The Acquia blog (of the Drupal community) has posted another in their series of guest posts with members of the wider PHP community. In this latest post well known PHP speaker and developer Michelangelo van Dam talks about PHP as a language that's "Under the Hood, Running the Web".

Most non-technical people out on the Web haven't heard of PHP before. They might not have even heard of many of the products that were built with this technology like Drupal, Magento, or WordPress. And together with other products built with PHP, these run about 83% of all internet web applications. The technology of PHP is very important to an enormous number of businesses, governments, and organisations around the world, so even though people might not be familiar with the language itself, there’s a very good chance they’ve used it online today.

He talks about the recent movements in the PHP community to be more standards-driven and focusing on better performance overall (both in applications and the language itself). He points to the work the Drupal community has done adopting Symfony components and the gains it gives them. He also mentions the huge impact things like Composer and the PHP Framework Interoperability Group have had on the PHP community and ecosystem.

Yes, the future of PHP looks very promising and the community is on a roll. [...] With strong communities working hard on each technological level and better able to cooperate than ever before, PHP will prevail where other technologies have failed. And let's have fun while we’re at it!