In this recent post Laurie Voss has voiced his opinion about the PHP language - that it needs to die, but also asks what should replace it.

The reason I know PHP has to die is because I've seen this before. Roughly a decade ago, PHP killed Perl. [...] As a language for newcomers, and especially for web developers, it was already dying in 1999 and was mostly dead by sometime around 2005. [...] There was no reason you couldn't write a perfect web app in Perl, but in PHP you'd do it faster and easier, despite the flaws in PHP itself which were, even then, already obvious.

He talks about moving on from PHP, why almost requiring a framework to do anything these days is a bad thing and how, despite the flaws the language has, he feels "trapped in a language that's losing its suitability for the task." He suggests that one successor might be Ruby on Rails but also points out some of the flaws it has including performance, Active Record and possible issues with code generation. He notes, though, that this isn't quite the replacement he had in mind and that there's just not something there to fill that gap.

Be sure to read the comments for lots of great opinions from both sides of the PHP opinion fence.