This new post on the Zend Developer Zone points out an eWeek article that talks about PHP putting mainframe developers in prime time.

As mainframe developers migrate from legacy systems to new languages and environments, PHP should be on the short list, said a longtime mainframe programmer who now helps others to adapt to new technologies.

The eWeek article talks about the move they think (well Darryl Taft thinks) mainframe developers should make. He even quotes Wayne Duquaine as saying that:

PHP also features a short development time. PHP scripts are five-to-10 times more productive than hand-coding a server application in Java or C from scratch, he said. And PHP also easily integrates database management system processing with HTML and XML processing.

They also comment that PHP is a good alternative to the more complex, and sometimes, more difficult languages in other LAMP-style packages.