I suppose that's true in absolute terms (nobody is at Facebooks level). However, there are definitely an army of really high traffic sites out there written in PHP, many of which predate Facebook. Problems of scale aren't exclusive to Facebook by any stretch.
It seems to me that Facebooks choice of PHP, in that context, was a big advantage. They've undoubtedly been able to draw on the experience that others have had at scale on very similar stacks. That might not have been as true for MySpace.
That said, MySpace had a whole host of internal issues. I briefly worked for a sister site at Fox Interactive Media and had at least some insight into what was going on over there. I'm sure someone will write a book about it one day:)
If they stuck with crusty old PHP, I have no doubt they would never be able to manage the load.
For some reason ppl think Mark created it on the 3rd day
It's not that easy to get top talent if you stick to MSFT platforms.
From linked article:
> Silicon Valley has lots of talent like him. Think about the technology he knows. Hint, it isn’t Microsoft.
http://scobleizer.com/2011/03/24/myspaces-death-spiral-due-t...
That's the number one benefit of an open source stack: it's possible to know the stack inside out. If it's closed source, there's an eventual point at which you're dealing with a black box.
"use of the software within your company as a reference, in read only form, for the sole purposes of debugging your products, maintaining your products, or enhancing the interoperability of your products with the software"
PHP is actually a good templating language and a passable rapid-prototyping language. The fact is that it's more important to stay agile when you're growing exponentially then to pick some optimal technology.
PHP's simplicity makes it one of the best choices to be able to incrementally build a robust and scalable back-end underneath it as you go. ColdFusion and .NET I imagine to be some of the worst (though I have no experience with either, so maybe I don't know what the fuck I'm talking about).
Ever heard of JBOSS? Did you know they have an open source CFML project called Railo? Or that Chris Schalk, developer advocate, from Google called what another open source cfml distro called Open Blue Dragon was doing on the GAE as "awesome". He said it was the easiest way to get running on the GAE.
The best developers can do amazing things in a number of different languages.
Finding good talent that's experienced with huge scale sites is not going to be easy regardless of language. It's not like MySpace could have been RoR and suddenly everything would have been simple, at their prime they were doing a ridiculous amount of traffic that only a handful of sites ever had experienced. There were probably 0 people experienced with PHP at Facebook's level, they all had to learn as they go and what they learned was they picked the wrong language so they created HipHop, a hack to overcome PHP and probably hundreds of others that help them scale better.