A totally reasonable reply (kind of expected someone to say it!) but the fact that they use php (despite the use of HipHop, which is a wonderful innovation) does say something about the language.

It just makes me sad that rather than saying "look what php can do with some work!" and doing something to head in a direction that could make some of its power uses (like FB) love/like the language, the people in charge simply seem to not care.

A better positioning would be saying something like "php is a great tool to start a web project in, and over time it'll continue to be the best tool to start a project in by helping people innovate even faster." Building it into boxes and decouple it from the rest of the code down the road, like FB have, is likely what most people will do, but at least saying PHP strives to fit this need would be a better vision than saying its for "Joe's weekend website", when clearly that's just shortsighted.

Saying what you're going to do in a public place does increase your chances of following through with it. PHP should document something that says what they want to be, even if its not what some people want them to be!

They are actually phasing out the HPHPc translator and are now developing, as far as I can see, a more conventional one, which translates php into bytecode and can perform JIT on the bytecode into native code without going through C++.