Ten years later, I can feel the tide turning again. Developers’ expectations of languages have moved on. If the critical thing Perl was lacking was PHP’s wonderfully flexible "associative arrays" (aka smart hashes), then what PHP is lacking is lambdas and method chaining. While PHP used to be the language where you could write a web page in twenty lines of code, nowadays it doesn’t feel like you’re doing it properly unless you’ve laid down at least a basic MVC framework of some kind. That boilerplate code is the tell: the language now requires modification by a framework to do what you need.
Back then, I felt the die-hards clinging to Perl for web development were silly. Now, with ten years of PHP experience under my belt, I’m in the same position. I can knock out a good website in an hour in PHP, and an excellent one in a day or two. Its performance characteristics are well-known and understood, so I can make it scale pretty much indefinitely. Every developer we’d want to hire knows it, and every system we’d integrate with has a wrapper library written in it. I am trapped by the convenience of PHP in a language that is losing its suitability for the task.
via Seldo.Com Blog – PHP needs to die. What will replace it?. I know what he’s talking about PHP is a language that at times shows it’s age and is ridiculed by people on the latest and greatest (Node.js/Ruby on Rails/etc). That being said PHP has some advantages that anytime soon are going to be hard to meet in terms of ease of deployment (name a shared hosts that doesn’t have PHP on it), tools and frameworks (WordPress, CakePHP, etc). I use PHP for my day job every day and will probably still be using it years from now, but there are times I wish the language itself was more modern. For a great overview of issues with PHP from a language design standpoint Hypercritical Episode 17 goes into some of the problems.