Speaking about where PHP is heading, I think it's pretty important to mention the funding Fabien Potencier managed to get for SensioLabs (company behind Symfony):

http://fabien.potencier.org/article/71/sensiolabs-raises-5-m...

I haven't seen any mention of that on HN.

Symfony components are used in Laravel and upcoming Drupal 8. The funding above means that SensioLabs will continue to work on solid platform(s) that will bring higher quality development and standards to PHP.

Honestly, I'm pretty happy for that.