[mseebach]

A lot of good people are working on a lot of PHP that isn't going away, and obviously they are going to improve tooling and the language itself. There is a renaissance in terms of making PHP development sane and thus not something good people run away screaming from - a bit like Java.

But the benefits of starting a new project in PHP are few: All of the original benefits (mainly low barrier to entry) are eradicated, and that leaves PHP to compete directly, as a full development environment, not as the only easy way to get code on the web, with a myriad of other languages that can, almost objectively, be thought of as better. Again, a bit like Java.