http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html Is a pretty good explanation of why we don'

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html Is a pretty good explanation of why we don't rewrite the whole site. A rewrite would involve every product dev stopping what they are doing and probably spending at least 18 months reimplementing their product in a different language. During that time all forward progress on products would be halted. I am absolutely certain it would be an unmitigated disaster for the company to try to rewrite the site in another language. Instead we have a small team of people making PHP really nice work work in. HipHop gives us full control over the language and lets us add in any constructs we like. We make sure stock PHP runs, but also the additions we need to the language can be added as well. I don't really understand devs who think reimplementing in another language is easy or the right thing to do. It's almost always the wrong thing from my experience and always lot harder and takes a lot longer than expected.