From Alex Young's blog there comes this post stating some of his opinions about the future of PHP and how it "is more depressing than ever".

Rasmus Lerdorf wrote quite a nice article called The no-framework PHP MVC framework. In it, he demonstrates how to create a simple application by using the model view controller design pattern. Using this design pattern, he creates a basic framework to save some effort with common tasks.

Put your hands up if you were a PHP programmer who was writing python or ruby on the side due to the incomprehensibly naive design of PHP… Now put your hands up if you understand and have worked extensively with object oriented programming, functional programming and perhaps agile programming. You're the guys I'm talking to.

He continues, alluding to the lack of sophistication amung PHP developers (procedural over OOP?) and some comments about what he thinks PHP is really missing. He does, however, encourage those out there just getting into design patterns with PHP to check out the article if for nothing more than a good intro to MVC.