Kevin Schroeder has a new post to his blog today asking "Why PHP?" - not so much a "why you should chose PHP for your development", more of a why PHP is the way it is.

Today on twitter there was a conversation going on about the responsiveness of the core PHP developers to PHP users. [...] This post isn't necessarily to correct perceived errors, to stand behind correct statements, or to state what I believe the problem is. Rather, it is to add something to the conversation that I don't think I've seen much of. The Twitter conversation was, for me, more of a contemplation kickoff and so the purpose of this post is to propose some thoughts for consideration. I don't have sufficient karma to propose changes directly, but I have bet my career on PHP and I want to see it beat the crap out of every language out there.

He points out that most of the opinions out there seem to be of the "what" PHP is rather than the "why" PHP is. He notes that the discussions about the core development (and developers) that's been happening recently is more of a symptom of a larger problem - an unclear definition as to what PHP is and what problem it's there to solve.