Most of all, the article is just plain wrong, especially in the last sentence "Their servers are only a tiny fraction of computers deployed world-wide that are interpreting PHP code." From what I've heard, Facebook does use PHP, but their PHP code is not interpreted, it is compiled using a custom compiler. And if you RTFA, it clearly states that Facebook developers implemented numerous optimizations that are not available in the default PHP distribution. There's no evidence that would support the "conservative ratio of 10 for the efficiency of C++ versus PHP code" in Facebook's case.

Yeah, but if you keep the current naming scheme, you get to call the incompetent bank employees "vankers" :)

Mod parent up. And see http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/endemic

Yeah, funny, but this precisely illustrates the difference between "random" and "arbitrary" in science. "Arbitrary" means I don't care what you pick, "random" means I care that nobody should be able to predict what you'll pick. And that is clearly not the case if you pick 5 all the time.

I gave Lua a shot, several years ago. Was disappointed, quite a lot. Did not feel right to me at all. In fact, I soon found myself fighting it on many occasions. At that point in time, read() was *silently* failing for binary data. Took me quite some time to figure out that this is causing the unexpected behavior I observed. During the process, I read some reference and found nothing. Only some googling after I knew what was going on got me to a page that, among other things, addressed this issue with a laconic "binary read() is expected to work in Lua 5". That was enough to push me over the edge, I left Lua and never looked back, and I'm perfectly happy with that decision. Which only goes to show that there is no silver bullet, no "universally great first programming language", I guess.