Many reports are circulating that WordPress is now completely free of it’s legacy with the Calypso Project. But even Matt Mullenweg, the supposedly technical minded founder is carefully missing the words PHP and MySQL in his blog post:

Written purely in JavaScript, leveraging libraries like Node and React.

100% API-powered. Those APIs are open, and now available to every developer in the world.

This all JavaScript and API powered interface still runs on the same codebase as before it – granted through an API. This API may as well be changed to use Contentful, Medium’s API or Drupal 8 REST API using an adapter – obviously requiring quite a bit of work.

It’s not that Calypso isn’t neat, but stating WordPress is now JavaScript is just plain wrong. If you would run the Calypso shell with a different repository, then sure it would be free of it’s legacy.

But as of now WordPress ditching PHP is just sensationalistic reporting.