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Maybe the Perl CTO wanted the product in Perl and not PHP because he knew Perl and didn't know PHP? Do we really need all this psychoanalysis and identity stuff to explain that?

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This is often the real driver in these decisions. A previous company I worked at had an API written in modern PHP with Laravel. Traffic wasn’t very heavy on most days and we could autoscale when it was required. It worked great and we hadn’t encountered business problems that couldn’t be fairly easily solved within the ecosystem. However, one of the execs on the business side knew some other exec at a big tech company who told our guy that “PHP can’t scale”. So then we get questions if we should we consider rewriting, if we’re using the “best” language for our needs, etc. They wanted to plan for some theoretical future that they couldn’t even define from a business sense.

Sure, it’s good to be aware of future business needs so that we, as technical people, can be asking the right questions to prepare for what that future may look like, but that almost never means a decision about language x over language y. It’s much deeper than that.

> Maybe the Perl CTO

That's an example. It is not the subject under discussion.

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