Hands down, the language made the projects easier to maintain. I have also rewritten from php to python, python to python, and perl to perl, many greenfield pro

Hands down, the language made the projects easier to maintain. I have also rewritten from php to python, python to python, and perl to perl, many greenfield projects in each, etc. Why did the language matter? Largely, static typing, concurrency ergonomics, fast compilation, and easy to ship/run single binaries. The fact it also saved 10-20x in server costs was a great bonus. Better design can absolutely improve a project and make it easier to maintain and more performant. And bad code can be written in any language. I am more and more convinced that dynamically typed code doesn't have a place in medium to large organizations where a codebase no longer fits in one person's head.