Adam D'Angelo , Quora Founder
Upvoted by Charlie Cheever , One of the founders of Quora • Marc Bodnick , Leads Quora's Business & Community Teams • Jay Wacker , Quora Topic Ontology Architect
We were sure we didn't want to use PHP. Facebook is stuck on that for legacy reasons, not because it's the best choice right now.[1] Our main takeaway from that experience is that programming language choice is very important and is extremely costly to change.
Python was a language that Charlie and I both knew reasonably well (though I know it a lot better now than I did when we started). We also briefly considered C#, Java, and Scala. The biggest issues with Python are speed and the lack of typechecking.
C# seemed pretty promising. As a programming language, it's great, but:
For a lot of little reasons, Java programs end up being longer and more painful to write than the equivalent Python programs. It's also harder to interoperate with non-Java stuff. Scala had a lot of the downsides of Java and the JVM, although it wasn't quite as bad. The language seemed a little too new and like it would bring some unnecessary risk (for example, who knows how good support will be in 10 years).
Two other languages we very briefly thought about were OCaml and Haskell (neither had big enough ecosystems or good enough standard libraries, and both were potentially too hard for some designers/data analysts/non-engineers who might need to write code).
We decided that Python was fast enough for most of what we need to do (since we push our performance-critical code to backend servers written in C++ whenever possible). As far as typechecking, we ended up writing very thorough unit tests which are worth writing anyway, and achieve most of the same goals. We also had a lot of confidence that Python would continue to evolve in a direction that would be good for the life of our codebase, having watched it evolve over the last 5 years.
So far, we've been pretty happy with the choice. There's a small selection bias, but all of the early employees who'd been working with other languages in the past were happy to transition to Python, especially those coming from PHP. Since starting the following things have happened:
All together, these give us confidence that the language and ecosystem is moving in a good direction.
[1] What are the horrors of PHP? and Do Facebook engineers enjoy programming in PHP? and Why hasn't Facebook migrated away from PHP?and
What are some of the advantages of PHP over other programming languages?
for more on that.
8,627 upvotes • Updated 260w ago • Asked to answer by Quora User and JR Ignacio
More Answers Below.
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Charlie Cheever , One of the founders of Quora
Upvoted by Adam D'Angelo , Quora Founder
A few things to add to Adam's answer:
Ruby is the other choice that I think would have been reasonable since it has many of the same advantages that Python has but Adam and I both knew Python better than we knew Ruby.
1,932 upvotes • Written 260w ago • Asked to answer by Adi Raman and JR Ignacio
Baishampayan Ghose , Prog Lang Nerd
Because Adam D'Angelo loves programming in Python? Facebook was initially written in PHP because Mark liked programming in PHP; today Facebook uses many other languages apart from PHP, like C++, Java, Erlang. Quora too, uses C++ apart from Python.
This whole argument that Quora should have been written in PHP just because Adam used to work at Facebook is moot.
2 upvotes • Written 238w ago
Yilun Zhang , Active Python User
Yilun has 20+ answers in Python (programming language) .
Pros in my opinion:
Cons in my opinion:
41 upvotes • Written 32w ago
Doug Bell , Software architect, Java Guru, lead developer of "Dungeon Master".
You answered your question in your comments: "Since Adam D'Angelo , the founder, had worked for Facebook, which heavily uses PHP."
Using PHP for an extended period of time is probably the strongest argument there is to use something--anything--else
9 upvotes • Written 3w ago