QUOTE(LamontStormstar @ Sat 11th October 2008, 5:40am)
Should Wikipedia's software be rewritten in Ruby on Rails? Discuss.
I've never used RoR and I'm but a dabbler in PHP so this ain't worth much.
What I hear is that RoR is very very nifty, and PHP not exactly as nifty. So maybe if one was starting over...
But the question becomes why would this be a good idea? There is a vast sunk cost (which is never a reason not to do something, that's why it is called "sunk" cost) but any rewrite has to get to be at least as good as the current implementation, or it's just a science project. Which can be fun....
I seem to recall Kelly M was working on a Java reimplementation, for fun.
But I tell my clients not to replace perfectly good COBOL programs (!!!), if they're working fine, just for the sake of replacing them. SO I'm biased in favour of things that already exist.
Interesting question though.