it's not strictly a compiled vs. interpreted issue, but the general rule is that compiled languages are usually able to do the same operations as an interpreted language much faster.
there is another general rule that the usability of a given language is inversely proportional to its performance. in other words, they slow things way down so that newbies can compete more quickly. This is entirely appropriate for a new endeavor. There are exceptions to both statements, of course. What people (business people, mostly) don't understand is that at a certain point, you have to tear down and start over. That is essentially what Facebook has done, except instead of rebuilding their building, they rebuilt the foundation and the whole block around it while the building itself was still standing. That way, they didn't have to send their people home while they rebuilt. The analogy here is that if they switched languages altogether, they'd have to fire all their PHP coders and hire coders for whatever they switched to. -wes On Wed, Feb 3, 2010 at 1:51 AM, Mike Connors <[email protected]> wrote: > Carlos Konstanski wrote: > > Writing a monster website with zillions of users in any interpreted > language seems silly to me. Fixing it by making PHP a compiled > language is one way to solve the problem, I guess. A simpler solution > might have been to translate the codebase to a compiled language. > > Excuse my ignorance on the matter, but what makes a > interpreted language inherently less appropriate for a web site like FB, > and > a compiled language inherently more appropriate. I'm not asking for a full > scholarly redress, but just a summary of the key points... > _______________________________________________ > PLUG mailing list > [email protected] > http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug > _______________________________________________ PLUG mailing list [email protected] http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
