I do not know PHP good enough to compare it to Python, but I am sure that Python would be an excellent choice since it is very easy to learn, has some support for OOP and is very intuitive.
I'm sorry, but as a _personal_ preference I think interpreted whitespace is a terrible idea. Sorry if you dont agree. As or a code switch, I have no doubts that python is a great language, it has many fans.. but I see no reason to switch.. sure its easy to learn, but the current developers already know php. Not too mention php is really easy to learn and understand. I mean really, you try and tell me php is hard or obfuscated or difficult to read or undocumented. You can't argue with that, the documentation available as well as the resources available for php are great, the built in functionality is great too. While it may not yet have as much available free code as PERL there is lots of availabe code to reuse, especially for the kind of thing we are currently doing. Besides.. really I want someone to post what exactly we would gain by switching languages, and why its worth the hundreds of manhours it would take to port the code. Why can't we just spend that time improving the current code?
Lightning