Facebook, Yahoo, Wikipedia, even Google.
Yahoo is yahoo.
Wikipedia wouldn't have the resources to change anything.
Google has a wiki page for their developers telling them to never ever use PHP for any google project.
Facebook clearly found PHP usable before they created Hack, otherwise they would (a) not have bothered and (b) may well not have existed in the first place.
The accurate statement is probably closer to "FB created hack to adapt to performance demands at an unusual scale and add some additional typing discipline bringing additional order across a large engineering team."
At Facebook scale, performance gains have huge returns (adding typing can improve pefromance), so they try to improve all parts of their infrastructure, not just PHP.
For example, Facebook's bolt for native code: https://code.fb.com/data-infrastructure/accelerate-large-sca...
PHP probably did have more low hanging fruit than say C, I'll give them that.
On the other hand Microsoft does use PHP in some cases, where it makes sense, like company blogs. What's wrong with that? Nothing. The right tool for the right job. People that hate on PHP are usually people that over engineer things. Why build something like Wordpress in .NET or Node.js...when you don't need that, because you already have Wordpress and it works fine for a small site or blog? People will spent 10x the amount of time trying to -not- use PHP on a simple project than to use that time doing something else.
It's like this new "let's containerize everything" movement. Ok, you just spent an hour setting up something that would normally take 5 minutes, and you now have access to a bunch of features your little app will never ever use. Congrats.
No one is saying use PHP to build a super complex webapp, (though you could do that if you wanted!) But for small project PHP is very hard to beat when it comes to time/benefit. Right tool, right job. Simple. Biggest complaint I have against modern developers is the tendency to make a simple thing complex because it's en vogue to use X, vs Y. Gotta build this small web app with 50 users and no need to scale, better build in Node and Kubernetes. So laughable.
I didn't know that, but it makes sense - the things that PHP's good for (getting a web-based service backed by some sort of datastore up and ready to receive requests) are not the things that Google (on the whole) cares about.
Google instead cares that the thing can be improved and maintained by your colleagues, few of whom know PHP.
Google might be able to move quicker if they allowed php. Facebook killed them in social. The type of products google can offer is limited by this decision.
