PHP needs to die. What will replace it?

Don't want to be inflamatory, but:

PHP has already been replaced by Ruby/Rails as the good thing that should be used for new projects. Only PHP developers don't see that.

You lost me when you tried to argue that ORMs are not useful. Its easy to see why PHP developers think that, though.

I'm convinced that PHP is just too big, too popular, and, as the author realizes and points out, too fast and utility-wise too well-equipped to die at this point in time. Whatever may be able to kill it off surely won't be Ruby, Perl nor Python.

why does one language have to die for another to become more popular?

if you don't like php, don't use it.

You're being inflammatory. Rails has nowhere near the install base that PHP has, and furthermore, it's a framework, not a language, so the comparison is unequal. Further, setting up and installing Rails is nowhere near as frictionless as installing, for instance, CodeIgniter. Until that can be said, Rails is not a viable alternative.

I'm all for a PHP alternative. I use it because it's ubiquitous, but I have no love for the syntax or the internals. But the only way you can compete with it is to have the same kind of momentum mixed with the kind of frictionless use that comes standard.

The article states that php doesn't have lambdas and method chaining, although it does. They aren't well done, as per usual, but it definitely has them.

Honestly, we may be best off doing a CoffeeScript style pre-processor for PHP. Because PHP isn't going anywhere, no mattter how much we may prefer other languages, PHP's popularity is one of pure pragmatism, something the language purists don't seem to understand.

Get me from 0 to "Hello, World" as fast as you can. That's how you build the next PHP.