A while ago, maybe two years or so at the time of writing, I began thinking PHP was dead. There were releases, and bugfixes, of course, but no noticeable innovation strategy. It's over the zenith, I believed, and that we'd see a slow but steady decline in projects. Time for rethinking technology at home and at work?
Today, it seems my thoughts were too early: The PHP group has since released PHP 5.4, 5.5 and the first alpha of 5.6. Each of them has brought a list of improvements not only on the detail level, but actually meaningful to adapting to nowaday's languages: Short array syntax, traits, method and array call chaining, full closure support, generators (yield), to name just a few. Also, they finally managed to rid themselves of the magic quotes crap. At the same time, each release has brought performance and memory usage improvements. And all that without compromising on stability: The number of critical bugs is perceivedly on an all-time low.
Also, the rise of Composer and its becoming a pseudo-stand