Re: [Caml-list] [Was: OCamlJit 2.0]

[Yoann Padioleau <padator@wanadoo.fr>]

On Nov 20, 2010, at 8:25 AM, Benedikt Meurer wrote:
> You can develop web services using probably any programming language available in the world. That's what I was about to say, it doesn't matter from a technological point of view. So if the programming language is irrelevant, but you have to pick one, you'll start looking for arguments to prefer one over the other (based on available libraries,

I think this is the key, available libraries and tools around the language.

> marketing, etc.). Some argument made Facebook pick PHP (instead of Perl, Java, Ruby, C/C++, OCaml, Haskell, Standard ML, whatever), probably something trivial like availability of PHP developers

You think smart people in startups make big decisions based on such trivial things ? 
I guess they've chosen PHP in 2005 because it made sense to choose PHP in the context of what they were doing: prototyping
a social website as soon as possible by reusing as much as possible (Apache, Mysql, etc).
I know OCaml, I know PHP, I know Java, and in 2005 I've written my homepage in PHP, not OCaml, not Java.

> , or simply because PHP was popular at that time (i.e. there were people who knew the term "PHP").
> 
> Now the world looks different of course, there are hundreds of millions lines of existing code, and really porting all that code to a new language would involve a lot of effort, money and time.
> 
> Benedikt
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