In this new post from Watts Martin he suggests that "PHP is not an acceptable COBOL" - the language, while popular and useful now, may not age as well in the future (say 10 or 15 years).

PHP is to the web what Visual Basic is to Windows, but even more so: a powerful enough language to do nearly anything you want, ubiquitous, easy to get up and running (on many web hosts it's pre-installed), and forgiving of shitty code. [...] While I'm happy to see PHP start getting "modern" language bits (you Lisp hackers, stop snickering), the more I'm exposed to modern PHP in practice the more I think it's doomed. [...] A friend compared PHP to the COBOL of the web, and indeed, that seems to be COBOL's philosophy, too.

He also mentions some of the things available for PHP - frameworks, dependency management, PEAR, PECL - and some of his struggles with each. There's plenty of feedback on the post with some good interaction back from the post's author.

The International PHP Conference has posted the video they recorded at their 2010 event of Pierre Joye and Johann-Peter Hartmann's keynote presentation "PHP: Yesterday's Scala and the Cobol of Tomorrow".

PHP came a long way, and we are no longer the cool new kid on the block. On the other hand side we are still far away from being the new cobol, and there is a lot of great stuff going on inside php and the php community. What happened to PHP the last few years, what is happening right now and what will be the next 5 years? Is PHP ready for nowadays trends? Does it fit for Social Web, NoSQL and HTML 5? Should You better be learning Scala right now?

The video runs about 45 minutes and compares some of the features Scala offers, a brief history of PHP, some of the trends of current development and where PHP needs to go in the future to keep up with trends.