PHP is the Fortran of the world-wide web: it demonstrated the power of code
embedded in web pages, but has since been superseded in many developers’
minds by more contemporary technologies. Even so, as with Fortran, there
is far more PHP code out there than one might think, and PHP is still
chosen for new projects. There is a certain amount of tension in the PHP
development community between the need to maintain compatibility for large
amounts of ancient code and the need to evolve the language to keep it
relevant for current developers. That tension has now come into the open
with a proposal to split PHP into two languages.

Source: LWN.net – [$] PHP and P++