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A comment on Ask HN: Is there evidence regarding PG's theory about powerful languages?. Parent comment

Re:Ask HN: Is there evidence regarding PG's theory about pow... by wasdfan on Monday April 11, 2016 @12:50AM (#11469706)
You're engaging in base rate neglect: the pool of PHP programmers was vastly larger than the pool of LISP programmers when Facebook was founded.
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Re:Ask HN: Is there evidence regarding PG's theory about pow... by paulsutter on Monday April 11, 2016 @12:59AM (#11469718)
There's a funny story about when cofounder Dustin Moskovitz first wanted to help on the site. Choice of language was obviously not such a big deal to them.

From http://www.businessinsider.com/how-moskovitz-became-facebook...

>Dustin was like, 'Hey, I want to help out. I want to help you do the expansion.'

>Zuckerberg told Moskovitz, "That's pretty cool. But you don't know any PHP."

>"That weekend he went home, bought the book 'PERL for Dummies,' came back, and was like, 'OK, I'm ready to go,'" Zuck said, and told him, "The site's written in PHP, not PERL, dude."

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