PHP 5.0 was released in July 2004. Almost 11 years and we know that they gave up on PHP 6.0 🙁
In IT world, that is a massive failure and a huge embarrassment!
Think for a minute: thousands of “genius” developers working together to improve PHP itself, rather than creating another bloody framework!!! How would you begin to count? Phpnuke, Mambo/Joomla, Drupal, WordPress, Typo3, Magento, Moodle, Symfony/Silex, Zend, Prado/Yii, Codeigniter, Cakephp, Smarty, Doctrine, Adodb (once upon a time everyone was writing a db layer and we never needed to switch to a different database system?!)
(Zend (the company) is using it as a cash-cow and not trying enough to improve it. Even Microsoft, Oracle, Google and others are doing the same!)
PHP has already been losing blood by losing its appeal for developing solutions quickly. It is a widely-used tactic: come with something simple, elegant and free to attract many “users” (not developers) first and then commercialise it.
I am happy with Laravel 3! I will just laugh at people certifying themselves for Laravel 5 or Zend Framework 2 or even PHP. Because they see themselves inferior and also cannot see the blatant logical issues in these codebases.
I will give you few examples soon: (link here)
They are not PHP developers, but framework users. That is why you must have seen many job adverts saying they are looking for “users” or customisers of such systems e.g. Senior Drupal Developer! Did you even read the codebase of Drupal?! You would have puked! So-called digital agencies (aka old software houses) cut corners to cut cost.
Some companies have been moving to other platforms such as Python, Ruby, even Perl, and nowadays JavaScript on server-side with Node.js. We cannot blame them.
PHP is dying faster. No one would have guessed Altavista would disappear, same for Netscape and IE (yes, I know, but soon it will). No would have guessed JavaScript would have a star-like comeback!