"the intervening years allowed the PHP mess to become only more entrenched" They specifically choose to do it and not move to an other language. One of the rea

"the intervening years allowed the PHP mess to become only more entrenched" They specifically choose to do it and not move to an other language. One of the reasons was: PHP programmers are cheap and plenty full and can do quick iterations. Sounds a bit like you are complaining about other peoples choices, it really is their choice. :-) I'm not saying it is possible to move to an other language. Just look at Paypal they moved their customer-facing code from Java to node.js and got a very large productivity increase: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V5yk5SZxWX4 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V5yk5SZxWX4 Obviously the reason Paypal choose node.js are similar to why Facebook choose PHP: quick iterations, means more iterations, which means more experimentation and better results.