I think the fact Facebook decided to just fork that language instead of improving it shows how bad the core development was. The internals newsletter was just brutal. I remember reading a thread from a Facebook dev asking who quietly just reverted his commit. No discussion, no nothing, the code was just reverted if someone didn't like it.
I really think that was a major misstep by the project.
> I really think that was a major misstep by the project.
Oh, yeah.
As someone who has written and maintained a lot of "infrastructure-level" stuff, I have come to learn that releasing a project that serves users, or is infrastructure for other projects, is like having children.
Making them is fun. Releasing them, is a pain, but, once they are out there, it is my Responsibility to support them, and accept that they have their own agency.
I can't just go in and pretend that I'm Lord Farquaad, and treat the project as if it's my private fiefdom. It's now a public resource, and my decisions and actions affect a lot of others. I also tend to write software that supports folks with a rather ... pithy ... demeanor, so screwups can result in not-pleasant feedback.
That's a big reason why I don't mind that most of my public repos aren't popular.
Hack is only PHP in a very ship-of-theseus sense - it has PHP _vibes_ but they replaced the language, the runtime, the standard library, and all of the infrastructure
(and all of them much improved over PHP IMO - especially XHP [equivalent to JSX, where HTML is a first-class citizen in the language syntax])
[0] https://hacklang.org/