Do you know what PHP originally stood for? “Personal Home Page”. It was created as a rather simple and usable language for people who were not professional programmers, to be able to create a usable server-side program.
It did improve with professional input, even through the time Zend became the de facto parser, but the handwriting was on the wall. PHP has grown into a monster, co-opted by full-time professional programmers who just cannot stop improving it. They didn’t like spaghetti code so they created OOP, and then came these gigantic libraries and platforms.
If the programming world really needed another impossible-to-use-if-you-are-not-a-professional-programmer language, why didn’t it just improve ASP, or invent something else? Now, the pointy-headed committees are going to start deprecating “legacy code”.
Nobody minds that PHP is improved in ways that make it usable for giant megaliths like Wordpress. But I did want to voice one tiny little objection to the complete insensitivity the “new” PHP community shows to the roots of the language. Why do they insist on deprecating the old root code? Does nobody realize that it has a function other than building gigantic complex sites and that there are people who use it for exactly what the name actually stands for: Personal Home Page?