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Comment by TylerE | Hacker News Reader

We've made the corporate decision - after many bad experiences - to purge PHP from production, for the sake of our sanity.

We are not doing this lightly. The current codebase has ~2.5 man years invested in it.

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I strongly endorse this idea. The faster and more completely the development community moves away from using PHP in production, the better. I've started telling people not that PHP is bad, but that PHP is the avatar of technical debt. No matter what you personally do with PHP, the creators of the language and the other participants in the PHP ecosystem make it impossible to create a significant project in PHP without taking on ruinous amounts of technical debt - some of which takes the form of critical security problems! Python and Ruby, despite their faults, are more secure by default and have better security teams.

So in summary, I bet that purging PHP was tough, and I think you made the right choice.

From my experience technology is a big factor, but not ultimate. Ultimate factor is community around particular project. I truly believe Drupal community at this point is just right mix of following standrds and being focused on innovating in the same time. Whenever you custom code - you loose this huge leverage otherwise you could have by re-using existing UI/code/architecture (where architecture might be first and most important in the list.)

Anyway, I truly wish you luck with you project, but I would advise not to drop any particular technology just for sake of dropping it.

(I am not PHP fan, I am Drupal and Drupal community fan)

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