Hacker News Reader

But to be fair, wouldn't you also have to put in the manpower+time to get the experience to learn to do it in another language?

PHP is not all procedural spaghetti code, it does have modern frameworks, some of which are quite nice. And despite it's flaws (yep... someone posted Veekun's thing, everybody take a shot) there are reasons for choosing it, such as low overhead for deployment, and ubiquitous availability.

View on HN

Yeah, I posted Veekun's thing.

Low overhead for deployment and ubiquitous availability are definite advantages for the beginning of a project. Unfortunately, those two advantages disappear when your site becomes successful. For a large user base, there's more overhead involved in keeping a PHP webapp running smoothly, and by that time you won't need ubiquitous availability because you'll be, hopefully, running and configuring your own servers.

I can only assume you're right because I have no experience with having a site that's successful by anyone's standards (much less doing it in Python or Rails), but to me that still leaves a lot of room at the bottom of the pyramid for sites and apps that might not have any reason to expect such a large userbase.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com