Speaking about where PHP is heading, I think it's pretty important to mention the funding Fabien Potencier managed to get for SensioLabs (company behind Symfony):
Symfony components are used in Laravel and upcoming Drupal 8.
The funding above means that SensioLabs will continue to work on solid platform(s) that will bring higher quality development and standards to PHP.
Symfony is the best thing to happen to PHP in a long time and the guys at SensioLabs are doing a lot of great things. It wasn't on HN because HN still thinks PHP equals Wordpress/Drupal and those codebases are horrible.
It is unfortunate indeed, because it's not just the software that is great, but the surrounding community as well who create a lot of great tools like phpSpec, Behat etc.
Symfony and the related components are awesome. I've used Silex at work a few times and it's honestly fun. When done right, PHP can be almost as good as any other Object Oriented language. Unfortunately, when done wrong, it can be much worse.
http://fabien.potencier.org/article/71/sensiolabs-raises-5-m...
I haven't seen any mention of that on HN.
Symfony components are used in Laravel and upcoming Drupal 8. The funding above means that SensioLabs will continue to work on solid platform(s) that will bring higher quality development and standards to PHP.
Honestly, I'm pretty happy for that.