The most hated language is now adored by the whole world

Just amazing. I recall in 90s when Javascript was the most hated language in the universe, an ugly duckling that was mocked by everyone. It’s rise is astounding. Why is it succeeding where purer languages fail? Why don’t companies write interpreters for Ruby or Lisp and put them in web browsers? Why Javascript?

This job posting tells a tale:

The thing that amazed me the most – virtually every applicant was downright giddy at the opportunity to work with Ember.js full-time. To me, this just goes to show how popular Ember is becoming – and rightly so. Ember is getting a lot of traction and attention and its developer base continues to grow. If you follow me on Twitter, you’ll know already that I’m firmly in Ember’s camp. In my opinion its the best client-side MVC framework out there. I also firmly believe that client-side frameworks are the future of dynamic client interaction and Ember is helping to lead that charge.

Sadly, the realities of business weigh in. I have exactly one post open right now, and right now my greatest need is for a strong PHP developer. I sincerely hope this didn’t come off to people like I was advertising solely for Ember devs. I wish I could but I wasn’t. I posted our current tech stack because I know potential candidates find them exciting and its invigorating and comforting to know that you won’t be working on some awful “custom PHP framework” from 2004 that makes WordPress’ source code look reasonable.

My intention for the candidate is somebody who is rock-solid with PHP, preferablly an open-source contributor, and who is capable and interested in learning Ember. If I had another position available it would be for a front-end developer who amazing Ember and it would be to work in Ember all day long.

Again, sorry for the confusion.

(I’d like to address another, related, issue in this post, but feel free to stop reading here if you’re bored.)

Some of the responses I received by email and on Twitter were of complete confusion. Below is a list that sums up the confusion I saw.

Why are you using PHP? That’s stupid.
Why are you using Node with PHP? That’s stupid.
Why are you using Ember with PHP? That’s stupid.
I think a few people were thoroughly confused by the supposedly contradictory techs I posted. Here are the confusing parts, again.

PHP (Symfony 2 framework)
MySQL
Redis
Node.js
Ember.js

To those people who are confused, you should know that a production solution rarely involes a single technology. The days where we deployed a PHP and MySQL web site are over. Get used to it. You know what? I could toss a few more techs in there that we’ll be using.

Ruby gems
Web Workers
Socket.io
Three.js
D3

The truth is that all of these technologies combine to power what I’m trying to build. Could I do it all with PHP? Possibly. But implementing a lightweight server to handle web socket communictions from the Web Worker that power the “real-timeness” is better done with Node. Ruby currently provides a good chunk of our deployment process. Three.js and D3 provide data visualization. Redis is our amazing cache that we couldn’t live without. PHP is handling the API and is absolutely rocking at it, no matter what Jeff Atwood says.

Also: I think it is very weird that a cutting edge company like Apple is using PHP.