The software engineers at Facebook designed a new anti-spam system that gives an idea about the future of computer programming languages. The team has spent the last two years rebuilding the system that removes offensive, spam-malicious or otherwise unwanted messages from Facebook social network.
Facebook, currently the largest social network in the world has around 1.5 billion users worldwide, so to solve the problem of spam on such a large platform is no small task. The Facebook software engineers made an unusual choice for their task by using a programming language called Haskell.
Haskell was built in the early '90s by a committee of academics as a kind of experiment in language design. Since then it remained on the fringes of mainstream programming all these. For instance, at GitHub, the primary repository for software code on the net, on the list of the most popular languages Haskell ranks 23rd. Facebook chose it as the basis for its complex anti-spam system, even if not the most popular coding language among programmers. Facebook's spam-killer system went live earlier this year.
Coders choose programming languages for very personal reasons as well as for any number of technical reasons. Usually, these personal reasons inevitably intertwine with the technical ones.
According to Facebook's team of software engineers who worked on the anti-spam projects, Haskell is ideally fitted to fighting Facebook spam because it's suitable for executing many different tasks at the same time. The programming language also gives engineers the tools they need to code all these tasks on the fly.
Since spammers are changing their techniques so quickly and Facebook's social network is so large, the company needed a way of both building and operating its anti-spam engine at speed. According to Facebook's programmers, latency is the most important thing if they want to be able to immediately stop attacks. At the project worked well-known names in the industry, such as Jonathan Coens and noted Haskell guru Simon Marlow.
Taking into consideration that companies like Facebook, Amazon and Google represent the main trends where the rest of the internet is going, as the internet grows, many other online services will face the same problems as the big names face today. Facebook's Haskell anti-spam system can indeed point the way for the programming world as a whole.
