New Life for PHP
I have been a PHP 4 programmer, and a rather disapointed one, I might say.
I come from a Java OO design patterns background, and my entering into the PHP world some years ago was self-forced, mainly because it was (and is) such an ubiquitous language, and also because getting something off the ground was quite easy.
I have been watching the whole ruby and rails thing grow with quite some enthusiasm, and have been trying it out, and even used it on a "real" project.
I know PHP 5 has been around for quite some time, but I only dug into it a couple ou months ago, and I can say that the new version, with java-like method declarations and exceptions has breath a new life into a otherwise aging and spaghetted-out language.
I also know PHP is still not fully object oriented as rails but, in my experience, its runtime environment is quite faster that ruby, and there are a lot of programmers out there not ready to give it up.
Check this out
You will be seeing some new interesting applications and frameworks coming out of this language. Maybe one by yours truly!