I love Perl (worked with it for 10 years) but we decided early on that finding enough good Perl devs would be too hard. There are still a few Perl parts of the rewrite, you need to use the right tool for the job.
Sure, and I certainly agree with that choice. In my (limited) experience, a Perl->PHP rewrite either indicates a desire for more developers or a seriously weird or outdated Perl architecture. The latter was quite common in the early days of the web, where basically everyone's first web page was a mess of Perl CGI (or mod_perl a bit later), but as YP isn't that old and performed well enough before, I wouldn't have thought that this was the case here. Thanks for confirming my suspicion, wasn't intended as criticism.
YouPorn-before-the-sale outed themselves as a Catalyst stack user some time back; memory says they offered to donate a machine to act as an irc.perl.org node to help the community out but then discovered that their ISP at the time wouldn't allow IRC ...
"Finding enough good Perl devs" is actually very doable, it just tends to involve engaging them through the CPAN community. We've helped customers out with it a few times, with good results overall.
On the other hand, when trying to de-convolute an architecture a change of primary language often helps.
Does "we were substantially more confident of our ability to recruit sufficient PHP talent than Perl" seem like a reasonable rephrasing?
Funny. When I was running my music startup with couple mil users, it was originally coded in perl by my perl-genius cofounder. When my cofounder dropped, it was next to impossible to find solid perl developers(there are many who tinker with it). I remember recoding it in php and life getting so much easier.
