Facebook 's continued growth is based on many things - some of them require impressive moves that most people don't understand, like the acquisition of WhatsApp for 19 billion, and some are a bit more mundane. A good example is the news that came out today that the company has released a new Open Source language that, in true Silicon Valley style, it called, Hack .
The company needs to have its own language, which can be used by third-party developers so that it can produce faster and more functional results. This is where the Hack programming language comes in, which has already been used within Facebook for a year, and is intended to make the development process much faster. It has proven so effective that Facebook plans to switch to it to chart the future. Regarding the reasoning behind the Hack language, Facebook says:
With thousands of engineers working on millions of lines of code at Facebook, the challenges have escalated. We had a simple language for quick feedback, but could we mitigate the problems? Could we detect bugs with rapid iteration, and invest in development with PHP? Could improved code analysis and introspection help developers be more productive with tools like autocomplete? Traditionally, dynamically generated languages provide rapid development while sacrificing the ability to catch errors early and review code quickly, especially in larger codebases. In contrast, statically typed languages provide more of a safety net, but often at the expense of rapid iteration. We thought there had to be a common ground there.
The idea behind Hack is to combine more static languages like C with more dynamic ones like PHP. The difference is that static languages integrate error checking into the coding process, while more modern languages allow developers to code with errors, and test everything when they run the project.
From the company's blog post:
“Traditionally, dynamically generated languages allow for rapid development, but sacrifice the ability to catch errors early and address them quickly, especially in larger codebases. In contrast, static development languages provide more of a safety net, but often at the expense of rapid iteration. We believed there had to be a sweet spot. Thus, the Hack language was born. We believe it offers the best of both worlds: dynamic and static, and that this is something that is valuable for small and large projects.
