[milesokeefe]

Seems a big reason for that was the lack of maturity in the node module ecosystem 6-7 years ago.

From the interview:

"How do we gone down a PHP root? I think from a product point of view, we'd probably be a lot further along than we are now, because in the PHP ecosystem much like in the Ruby ecosystem, or even the Python ecosystem to some extent, this tooling is well understood. It has evolved over a long amount of time. You have your defaults that just work. You have your libraries, which have been time-tested, proven they're great.

Whereas in end of 2012, beginning of 2013 starting out into the node.js ecosystem, pretty Wild West. There's not a lot of stuff going on. There was barely a usable authentication library that we could start working with. Even to this day, it's not – there's a lot of things where if you were working in Ruby or PHP you’d go, “Yeah. Obviously, I'll just grab this library that everyone uses.” Whereas in node you go, “I can't believe that doesn't exist.”

I think when we wrote the first version of Ghost that wasn't a usable RSS library for parsing XML and delivering RSS feeds in node, and that was just mind boggling. Then that has repeated enough times to where it really slowed us down."