On the Oracle Technology Network today there's a new article from Rasmus Lerdorf about the current release of the language (PHP 5.4) and what he sees as the future for PHP.

Almost exactly eight years ago I wrote an article for the Oracle Technology Network called, “Do You PHP?”. In that article, I talked about PHP's stubborn, function-over-form approach to solving the "Web problem" and the fight to keep things simple. We were getting close to releasing PHP 5.0 at the time. Now here we are almost a decade later with a shiny new PHP 5.4.0 release, and while much has happened during that time, there are also many things that haven't changed at all.

The first talks about what's the same - the ecosystem surrounding the language and the strength of the LAMP stack that PHP helped to "found". He mentions some of the up-and-comers that are alternatives to this traditional setup and some of the extensions that have been added to improve PHP's functionality (DateTime, PDO, JSON support). He talks about other improvements in the language including:

• Better memory management
• Traits
• Short Array Syntax
• Closure binding
• Built-in webserver
• Native session handler interface
• Removal of register_globals, magic_quotes and safe_mode

He briefly looks ahead at "what's next" for the language and points to the "internals" mailing list and the PHP wiki