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Comment by sparkling | Hacker News Reader

Do you have some ugly corners in your code base? Lots of legacy stuff that you want to rework anyway, regardless the language? Then it might make sense.

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website is kind of slow and some bugs..so i am wondering if refactoring or bugs fixing is worth it or switching to a new modern language.

If your problem is speed, Ruby & Python probably aren't going to help. Query optimizations typically yield a lot of bang for the buck. Once you've harvested all of the low-hanging fruit there, in-memory caching (memcached, redis) can also bring a lot to the table.

Ruby and Python could help -- but depends what you're doing. They aren't going to magically make your DB queries faster... but certain libraries can perform many, many times faster.

Though, that's the library, not the language.

it also helps to find more programmers here in the bayarea if i switch to ruby, node etc all the cool programming dudes that i want to hire -are not in php.

If you were almost anywhere else, you'd have a much easier time finding .NET developers, but then there's the whole licensing can of worms (and .NET core isn't really a viable alternative at the moment).

Not many devs want to work on PHP codebases, that's absolutely correct. PHP does not really look great on the resume, unfortunately.

But you should be hiring to solve a problem -- seemingly speed and reliability, in your case -- not for a language.

But yeah, tell them what stack they will be working on ;)

Those languages won't be faster, they're pretty much the same speed. The labor cost of the rewrite would completely dwarf any possible micro-gains from switching between 2 languages that are already nearly the same speed.

PHP can be faster than Python, but I'm not aware of anything existing in the PHP space like NumPy.

It doesn't sound like OP is working on something that needs NumPy, and if he did, I don't see why he couldn't write a small script in Python to be called by the existing codebase.

I completely agree!

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