From my experience, some things that tend to trip people up in transition attempts: - choice paralysis - With Python, you must first decide whether you want to

From my experience, some things that tend to trip people up in transition attempts: - choice paralysis - With Python, you must first decide whether you want to invest in Django or Flask (or whatever). Then you get to decide whether to invest in Mako or Jinja (or whatever). etc, etc. W/ Ruby, you have Rails vs Sinatra. ERB, Haml, etc etc. In that sense, PHP is realistically more "convention-over-configuration" than the competition (whether MySQL for data persistence and raw HTML in templates are good defaults is a whole separate discussion) - poor interop w/ real world - good luck convincing a client to sign up for Node.js hosting. Or explaining that it doesn't come w/ wordpress (or phpbb or squirrelmail or pretty much anything not-so-sexy-to-develop-these-days-but-widely-used-by-non-techies.) - no measurable benefit - most levels of abstraction have comparable complexity in all languages, i.e. using ERB or raw PHP (or Jinja, or mustache, or whatever) generally take the same time and the same effort to write/maintain - code debts come from other factors (e.g. team member inexperience). In addition, most levels of abstraction quickly get cross-ported between projects.