The hell it is.

The Dragon Book of graphics is Computer Graphics: Principles and Practice by Foley and van Dam (and later Feiner and Hughes too). Like CG:PP, the other two books that you mention are books for scientists and engineers. The Black Book is for hackers of the early 1990s.

It's a book which describes a world that no longer exists. We don't have non-pipelined 80386 CPUs, non-existent or slow floating point, VGA data latches, or pretty much anything that the book describes in depth. I remember that world, and I remember it well.

The first edition of the Dragon Book has dated, and doesn't cover a lot of modern compiler practice, but over half of it is still relevant. The Gang of Four book also shows its age, but it still serves its purpose as a dictionary, and as a tool for helping you to think in higher-level structures. Very little in the Black Book is useful today as anything other than history.

Neo-Godwin's Law!

To be fair, it didn't work. So it's only attempted oppression.

Sorry, they're not kosher.

Has any new company ever succeeded with Java Enterprise?

If you're old enough, you might remember a company called "eBay". It's apparently still around as a cheap Chinese crap vendor.

But seriously, plenty of new companies have succeeded with Java EE, but most new companies don't make external-facing social media websites. You probably haven't heard of the company that wrote the online banking system used by your financial institution, but chances are good that it's written in either .NET or J2EE.

Why would you arbitrarily exclude (F)CGI?

Would you use (F)CGI today? If the answer is "no", you have your answer.

If you don't know why Facebook would be reluctant to fund a compete rewrite of their core money-making software, then you've never worked in industry.

Hack does type inference. It doesn't do let-polymorphism because that plus subtyping is formally undecidable. But you only have to declare the types of functions, not every variable inside those functions.

To be fair to Facebook, no other languages had those advantages in 2002-2003. Assuming you didn't want to use F/CGI, plugins for Apache or the equivalent, your server-side scripting options were JSP, Asp.NET and PHP.

PHP was a reasonable choice under the circumstances, but they've now reached the limit of what it can do. It's good to see that they're moving to an entirely new and better language which just happens to have a similar syntax. If I was a Facebook engineer, I could live with that; syntax matters, but it doesn't matter as much as semantics and pragmatics.

No. Facebook is developing a new language which is syntactically similar to, and inter-operates with, PHP. Calling Hack a "version of PHP" is like calling Delphi a "version of ALGOL".

That's true. If you define "religion" as "that which I don't like" (like Christopher Hitchens did in God is Not Great), then all religions have that in common.

Option #3 is a non-option, but I do like the way you think on option #4.

Or the NSA.

...and yet if you look at it with a critical mind and a lot of reason and a lot of scientific investigation, you find that it has significant benefits, as TFA points out.

Besides, this is Slashdot. We quite like fantasy. And sci-fi, too!

Apparently atheism doesn't make you any more more likely to accept scientific evidence if it contradicts your preconceived biases.