I have some old apps written in PHP that I'm thinking of converting to Python - both are websites that started as simple static html, then progressed to PHP and now include blogs with admin areas, rss etc. I'm thinking of rewriting them in Python to improve maintainability as well as to take advantage of my increase in experience to write things more robustly.
Is this worth the effort?
Other issues include how business critical are the applications and how hard will it be to find maintainers. If the pages are hobbies of yours then I don't see a reason why you shouldn't rewrite them since if you introduce bugs or the rewrite doesn't go according to schedule a business won't lose money. If the application is central to a business I wouldn’t rewrite it unless you are running into limitations with the current design that can not be overcome with out a complete rewrite at which point the language choice is secondary to the fact that you need to throw out several years of work because it’s not maintainable and no longer meets your needs.
Is rewriting a PHP app into Python a productive step?