In the latest post to the SitePoint PHP blog Adedayo Adeniyi talks about Joomla's "coming of age" and some of the changes that have come/are coming in the latest versions.

Over the years, there has been a healthy rivalry between the main CMSes in use on the planet: WordPress, Drupal, and Joomla!, and all three have hosts of die-hard fans that would pitch for their favorites over the others any day. Don’t worry, I’m not about to add to the high pile of subjective CMS comparison posts available on the web. Instead, I will briefly review all the recent changes in Joomla! that have modernized it for the present day developer – from version 3.0 onwards (currently 3.3).

She talks about some of the most recent changes including easier updating, the tool being mobile friendly out of the box and more flexible user access handling. She also mentions the improvements in "developer friendliness" and that it's become a good bit more security-conscious. Other topics mentioned include the JED (Joomla Extension Directory), smart search/tagging and improved database handling.