I've been to some conference lately and next to me was a guy sitting excited about the high traffic system he's building—I asked about the language he is using:

He (playing with his iPad 3): PHP

Me: I thought PHP devs died out for years??

He (angry): PHP is still the most used language for the web and it's fast.

Me: Do you guys still mix front-end and back-end code?

He (still angry): Of course not.

Back home I started googling "PHP" and "PHP frameworks" for the first time since 2003 again. I was surprised: there are many Rails-inspired frameworks like Yii, Zend, Codigniter, etc. And I tried to be objective giving PHP another chance (I haven't an actual use for PHP but I was just bored and wanted to be prepared for better counterattacks next time).

My impressions:

- There seem to be too many frameworks or call them ecosystems, so I couldn't figure out which is the dominating one (Zend?). And I am not sure if they are really interoperable

- Not relevant but awkward: most frameworks websites (except Yii) and in particular the PHP site look like 2003. What disturbed most was the often used claim "no console needed".

- On Freelancer.com, Monster or any other job-related site the quantity of postings for PHP devs were massive—any other web-related fraemwork/language else like Ruby, Python, Django was a small fraction oft that.

After looking at some "modern" PHP code (which strictly follow the MVC patterns now) I still couldn't get warm with PHP. I assume that most PHP devs are long-time PHP devs and I don't understand how PHP can attract people compared to newer concepts.