I'm a little confused as to the need for Hack unless you have a code base in PHP and need to ship tighter code (which is a problem Facebook has and my team probably has as well).
Adding lambdas makes PHP more Ruby-like and generics and type checking are straight out of Java. I'm still unconvinced in how this makes programming websites more efficient or bug-free than existing languages. Can you please elaborate on that?
> we even had a Muslim fundamentalist who is very concerned about things in Pakistan.
So, does having an interest in your homeland make you a fundamentalist all of a sudden? I'm Pakistani. I read and share stories about Pakistan all the time. Its offensive to assume that because I have an interest in stories about my homeland (which happens to be a breeding ground for religious fundamentalists), I'm a religious fundamentalist as well. (I'm not at all religious, actually.)
In my 6ish months of programming in Nodejs full-time, I have yet to run into a library that only runs on 0.4 only or requires my version of gcc to be patched and re-built. Which Node libraries were you trying to use?
One of the problems I have with articles like these is that they focus on Javascript's use in front-end development so the conversation settles on DOM tools examples of good Javascript.
Using Node.js (i.e. non-DOM server side Javascript) myself, I would love to see examples of beautiful Javascript in general i.e. linguistic best practices, not those specific to DOM programming.
"We realized early on that what we were doing could be national in scope and we didn't want a name that tied us to one place."
Personally I find that one of the most important reasons to think long and hard about a name. Most startups go through many pivot points until they finally get it right. Choosing a name that is overly representative of the present business model can lead to team lock-in that could spell the death of a company before it even gets going.
It seems a wiser decision is to go with a name that represents a startup's future ambitions instead of its present circumstances.
Tried playing around and got stuck at the same level. The hint in this case is not very useful unfortunately: "These settings are config settings. You should run `git help config` if you are stuck"
Adding lambdas makes PHP more Ruby-like and generics and type checking are straight out of Java. I'm still unconvinced in how this makes programming websites more efficient or bug-free than existing languages. Can you please elaborate on that?