What's the Future of PHP?

A significant portion of the web is still powered by PHP, and much of this is bssically WordPress.

However, we are gradually seeing WordPress morphing into a Javascript platform as this video confirms.

Where do you think PHP is headed? If WordPress fully becomes a Javascript platform what will happen to PHP?

Let's discuss.

Comments

[Nikola Stojaković]

I can't watch the whole video right now but WordPress morphing into JavaScript would never happen because

1. WordPress is very old CMS and there is no point of rewriting it into JS
2. There are hundreds of thousands of plugins available for WordPress written in PHP - you would need to somehow integrate all this plugins with a new system
3. The reason why people use WordPress is in one part because of the cheap hosting. Many people threw their sites on a shared hosting via FTP, which can't be done with sites using JS on the back-end.

Regarding the future of PHP, it has a killer framework inspired by Rails - Laravel. So, just like Ruby will continue to live mostly thanks to the Ruby on Rails, I think PHP will continue to live mostly thanks to the Laravel.

[Jeremy Ikwuje]

Great points. However, your first point. No reason? How about performance, security, and language constraints?

[Nikola Stojaković]

Performance is not an issue for most WordPress websites and for those who need higher performance and can't scale WordPress solution anymore, they're already moving their websites to custom solutions. Facebook was built with PHP and Facebook didn't end up rewriting it in another language - they created HHVM and worked on their infrastructure to improve performance.