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> The question is not whether or not to poof into existence a port from all of FB to language X. That's not possible.

And yet Twitter has slowly migrated on the backend from Ruby to Scala/Java. They still use Ruby for the frontend, though it's not clear to what extent, since they've also migrated to a single-page, fat client design on the desktop. And at the very least, their choice of using Ruby when prototyping, was at least sane.

I understand that large codebases can't be migrated easily. But you can migrate individual components when needed, if you have a modular, service-oriented design.

Also - building new functionality in PHP is indefensible, unless their code-base is one big monolithic hairball, which I doubt it is.

> The question is, given that PHP is the current language, with all its faults, will it it cost more (including all definitions of cost) to make the switch? How long will it take? Does it get the job done? How bad is the damage?

An excellent point. Which in fact is an argument in favor of modularizing your code as much as possible, as early as possible. There are tools now like Apache Thrift which make this easier: http://thrift.apache.org/

Why thank you :)