Facebook has endeavored to make coding a more efficient process by developing acoding language called Hack. Facebook has been using Hack internally for quite some time, and now the company is open sourcing the tool for anyone to use. “Hack is a programming language for HHVM that interoperates seamlessly with PHP,” reads the “Hack Lang” website. “Hack reconciles the fast development cycle of PHP with the discipline provided by static typing, while adding many features commonly found in other modern programming languages.”
Facebook just released a new programming language — aptly named Hack — that will let programmers write code faster while more easily avoiding errors. Hack hits a sweet-spot by combining elements of both static and dynamic languages. Meaning, programmers can retain all the speed they’d have with a dynamic language (like PHP or Ruby), while also catching mistakes before runtime with early error detection traditionally only seen with static language. The company has migrated almost all of its PHP-based site to Hack over the last year (one of the beauties of Hack is that it coexists seamlessly with PHP files). Facebook has now made the language open-source, meaning that any engineer can use it and help improve it.
