[muglug]

> Is there anything that PHP is developing or adopting that can not be had at other established languages?

No, not really, but it's still very good for casual web development, which makes up the lion's share of all backend code being written today.

Languages don't need to evolve a ton to be popular – just look at Python, which is doing very well despite not having had a ton of radical changes.

[rglullis]

It's not "just" the language. It's also a matter of what the improvements bring in for possibilities of new developers and mindshare.

Python as a language hasn't changed much, but it made huge strides into the scientific community and got a lot of marketshare from ecosystems like R and Matlab. It's becoming king in the ML/AI side. Go is growing in the backend systems/devops stuff that used to be the realm of Python. Rust is getting more and more adoption as a systems language and focus on safety. Even Java seems to be adopting things that make it less bureaucratic while being general enough for the enterprise.

I am not saying that PHP has to go away or anything. It's just that I wished that new releases could have more interesting things to say besides "it's not as crappy as it used to be".

[muglug]

> It's just that I wished that new releases could have more interesting things to say besides "it's not as crappy as it used to be".

I don't think there are many people in PHP's orbit who want it to be a better Python, or a better Perl/Ruby/JavaScript.

PHP was written to be a good language for average web development, and I think that's where it will always shine. I'm perfectly happy with a gradual process of making it less crappy.

Having said that, I'd love some of Hack's features (e.g. reified generics, proper list/dict primitives) to make it into PHP.