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PHP is one of those "developer productivity languages?" I mean, this way be just a huge sin I'm about to commit, but really? I think most of the world see this whole HipHop deal as you guys had all this PHP and you need to optimize it. The idea that the syntax and style of the PHP language is one of the most well suited languages to solving general computing problems ... I just find that hard to take seriously.

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Please don't mistake me: PHP-the-language is not well-designed. And we absolutely would never have gone down this road if we didn't have a metric ton of PHP to run and continue developing.

There are a few things PHP gets accidentally right, though, and one of them is the execution model. Each request starts with a brand new empty PHP environment; runs in a single thread to completion; and must keep persistent state off to the side in a database or memcache or what have you rather than in language-level objects. This turns out to have been a really good set of decisions. It lends itself to a nice tight development loop: instead of save/recompile/restart the server/test, you basically save/load the page. It's easier to remember what the heck you were doing when you get feedback on the code you wrote in 500 milliseconds.

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