On the Engine Yard blog Davey Shafik has a new post celebrating ten years of PHP 5 as of July 13th, 2014:

Ten years ago yesterday on July 13th 2004, PHP 5.0.0 was unleashed onto the world. Bringing with it the Zend Engine 2, effectively a brand new PHP. [...] The truth is that until PHP 5, PHP was a mostly procedural language, while it supported classes and objects, they were a bolt-on feature. This history is still visible in the majority of its default feature set even today — including some of its newest additions like the new password hashing API.

He talks about the evolution of PHP even since version 5.0.0 and how other technologies, like Ruby on Rails, has influenced the language and its developers towards greater things. He shares his answers to a few questions including:

What is the most significant change to PHP in the last 10 years?
• What's the biggest change in the community in the last 10 years?
• What's the most pressing issue for PHP?
• What would you like to see in the next major version?

He also includes an infographic of the timeline that lead up to the PHP 5.0.0 release and the advancements since then. There's even a look at the "Future of PHP" with some emerging technologies and what might lie in store for "PHP 6" (whatever that may end up being).

On Reddit.com there's a recent post looking forward in PHP's future and asking the community what their predictions are for the language in the upcoming year. Comments run the range of trolling to useful, but here's some of the more interesting ones:

• "hopefully we finally see a bake-in of APC into the PHP core? Maybe?"
• "Hopefully it will catch up with the testability of Ruby."
• "PHP is becoming more professional, with better tools and processes. I hope people move towards PHP 5.4 as I love array literals/really dislike not having them."
• "I know python has been making good use of for a long time. So hopefully this sort of stuff continues."
• "I wish the PHP frameworks would embrace the PHP development server."
• "PHP 5.3 will become deployed on the majority of servers, thus allowing to actually utilize its new features in distributable FLOSS projects."

Share your own predictions and add your own comments to the post!

As Cal Evans and others in the PHP community have pointed out, there's a post on Tim Bray's blog (of Sun Microsystems) with his prediction for PHP for the upcoming year:

The short version: PHP will remain popular but its growth will slow, as people get nervous about its maintainability and security stories.

He does mention the two different stances of this statement - the good side (with low entry level, good applications and speed) and the stance he seems to believe in more - that there are just things about PHP and how its handled that could cause major issues down the line.

Be sure to check out the comments for community views on both sides of the story too.

Michael Kimsal has posted a formal prediction that a patch, created by someone in the community, will emerge making it simple to bridge the gap between PHP4 and PHP5 applications.

Given the high number of shared hosts still running PHP4, the backwards compatibility issues going from 4->5 (yes, there are some!) and the new PHP4 "end of life" date (8/8/8), someone will likely find a way to make these run together, and possibly even charge money for it.

He suggests that many hosts out there would happily pay a sum to get this kind of functionally for their customers. It would provide a solution to customers who just don't understand the force towards PHP5 and would make them (and their PHP4 applications) happier.

Michael Kimsal has posted a formal prediction that a patch, created by someone in the community, will emerge making it simple to bridge the gap between PHP4 and PHP5 applications.

Given the high number of shared hosts still running PHP4, the backwards compatibility issues going from 4->5 (yes, there are some!) and the new PHP4 "end of life" date (8/8/8), someone will likely find a way to make these run together, and possibly even charge money for it.

He suggests that many hosts out there would happily pay a sum to get this kind of functionally for their customers. It would provide a solution to customers who just don't understand the force towards PHP5 and would make them (and their PHP4 applications) happier.