Julien Verlaguet didn't just write code at Facebook — he tried to change the language 4 billion people's apps were built on.

In this episode of Computers, Coffee, & Beer, Julien tells Keith Adams the full inside story of creating Hack: a gradually typed dialect of PHP that brought static analysis, type safety, and sub-50ms error feedback to one of the largest codebases on Earth.

It started as a security project. It became an "adventure" — one that involved pitched battles with the HHVM team, developers who associated type systems with traumatic C++ compile times, and the realization that Facebook's "spaghetti noodle" dependency graph made strict typing nearly impossible.

If you've ever wondered what it takes to introduce a new programming paradigm inside a company running at Facebook's scale — the politics, the engineering, the human friction — this is that story.

🔗 Follow Computers, Coffee, & Beer for more war stories from the engineers who built the modern internet.

Chapters:
0:00 - Intro: Meet Julien Verlaguet
2:15 - Why Hack existed: PHP's security problem
7:17 - The pitch to the HHVM team (Keith's "okay kiddo" moment)
15:30 - Gradual vs. optional typing explained
28:00 - Facebook's spaghetti dependency graph problem
45:00 - Building a sub-50ms type checker
1:09:09 - The nullable salt vulnerability (why weak typing is dangerous)
1:15:26 - "TypeScript for PHP" — Hack's legacy
1:51:46 - The C++ developer's scar: winning over type system skeptics
1:54:53 - The George Lucas / Steven Spielberg analogy for innovation

🎧 Full episodes on YouTube + your favorite podcast app.
@ComputersCoffeeandBeer

📩 For Business Inquiries: don.broida@gmail.com


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Channel About:

Computers, Coffee, & Beer is hosted by Keith Adams and Julien Verlaguet — two engineers who helped shape the modern internet and have the war stories to prove it.

Keith built the HHVM JIT compiler at Facebook, helped virtualize the world at VMware (employee ~80), and went on to Slack before founding Pebblebed, an early-stage VC firm for technically ambitious founders.

Julien created the Hack programming language, spent years writing safety-critical compiler software for Airbus and nuclear plants, and now runs Skip Labs.

Together they dig into the systems, languages, and decisions behind the technology that actually runs the world — told by two people who were in the room when it happened.

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#Hack #PHP #Facebook #Programming #TypeSystems #HHVM #SoftwareEngineering #DevTools #ComputersCoffeeBeer

Keith Adams (VMware, Facebook, Slack, PebbleBed) and Julien Verlaguet (creator of the Hack programming language, founder of Skip Labs) dig into one of the most contested questions in tech: are LLMs actually thinking?

From Keith's early (failed) experiments training a tiny stack VM at Facebook AI Research, to Ilya Sutskever's prophetic 2014 NIPS talk, to the present-day race between Anthropic, OpenAI, and the open-source world, this episode covers the full arc of how we got here — and where programming languages, coding agents, and AI security are headed next.

Topics include:

• The "glass of beer" theory of LLMs and why Keith was wrong about Ilya
• Why LLMs crush coding but struggle with the physical world
• TypeScript vs. Python — which language will AI-native development run on?
• Julien's framework for getting dramatically better results from coding agents (hint: it's about state)
• The Anthropic Mythos announcement: real capability or marketing stunt?
• China, open-source models, and the 6-month moat problem
• Whether there's an escape velocity data flywheel in AI coding — and who has it

IN THIS EPISODE:
0:00 — Are LLMs "thinking" or just pattern-matching?
5:54 — Why coding is the perfect test bed for AI intelligence
10:50 — The glass of beer analogy: simulating the world one token at a time
18:10 — LLMs consume 10,000x more data than a human lifetime — does it matter?
21:30 — Should we design programming languages for alien minds?
41:56 — The "never call this method" incident (AI's literal brain)
1:01:47 — Why LLMs will obliterate humans at finding security vulnerabilities
1:08:23 — The six-month moat: why no AI advantage lasts
1:15:47 — Geopolitics, open source, and who controls AGI
1:31:32 — Elon Musk, data centers in space, and printing out lines of code

If you're a software engineer wondering whether AI is coming for your job — or just curious about what happens when two systems-level thinkers who've been in the trenches since VMware's early days get real about the future — this is your podcast.

🎙️ New episodes every week. Subscribe so you don't miss the next round.

From the Computers, Coffee & Beer podcast — Keith Adams and Julien Verlaguet dig into what who helped build the modern internet sharing their honest takes on the biggest ideas in tech.


🎧 Full episodes on YouTube + your favorite podcast app.
@ComputersCoffeeandBeer

📩 For Business Inquiries: don.broida@gmail.com


=============================

Channel About:

Computers, Coffee, & Beer is hosted by Keith Adams and Julien Verlaguet — two engineers who helped shape the modern internet and have the war stories to prove it.

Keith built the HHVM JIT compiler at Facebook, helped virtualize the world at VMware (employee ~80), and went on to Slack before founding Pebblebed, an early-stage VC firm for technically ambitious founders.

Julien created the Hack programming language, spent years writing safety-critical compiler software for Airbus and nuclear plants, and now runs Skip Labs.

Together they dig into the systems, languages, and decisions behind the technology that actually runs the world — told by two people who were in the room when it happened.

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#ai #llm #artificialintelligence #softwareengineering #techpodcast #programminglanguages #machinelearning #aivshuman #futureofcoding #podcast