In reply to Ryan Hellyer.

I guess I understand it as an experiment - but not from a practical perspective. Again, I don't live this stuff as much as you guys do - but I can't remember ever hearing someone discuss "man this website is slow and won't scale. let's rewrite the whole thing as Javascript". There are so many variables that go into site performance. Especially largely static content sites like most WP sites are.

Again, I agree JS where/when needed. If I'm doing typeahead, I'm using the Twitter library. Interactive photo editor...JS all the way. Drag/Drop calendar entries...JS.

Business logic and the overall MVC - sorry I want that on the server not in the client. Maybe for a greenfield development and if not doing it in Java, then something like Node.js could be interesting.

I think PHP has (rightfully) been slated by mature programmers due to the body of evidence of very poorly written PHP code (some of which is in legacy WP). I weep whenever I see a .php full of '<?' excursions littered among HTML. This is why I really like Twig. I also namespace everything and use 100% OO design. So for me WP and PHP is like an old comfortable shotgun and I know I will hit the clay target every time.

The most disconcerting part of this entire discussion, to me, is "what the heck highway are we on right now?" There are hundreds of thousands of plugin developers and theme developers out there who see PHP code in their sleep. Now we have these signals from WP (Matt) and others that PHP is persona non grata and we all ought to "learn Javascript deeply". I guess if you want to really pivot and abandon your base for a new direction, that's the way to do it. Most small shops do not have a team of programmers at the caliber or the bandwidth of Automattic and can't simply stop doing their normal duties and suddenly become JS gurus.

So. Where are we and where is this going?