It's playing catch-up, and it's severely hampered by its refusal to break backwards compatibility for anything. I did a PHP contract last year after not having

It's playing catch-up, and it's severely hampered by its refusal to break backwards compatibility for anything. I did a PHP contract last year after not having done PHP in years. I had genuinely high hopes for it because of having seen sentiments like yours. And Symfony is a pretty okay framework (but not great), Composer is decent, and HHVM is a pretty fast VM. But the language itself has fundamentally not changed at all -- it's still flawed in deep ways, while the developers seem mainly preoccupied with adding as many features from Java as they can. In 2015, I see someone defending PHP and I think they simply don't know any other language.