In this new post from Watts Martin he suggests that "PHP is not an acceptable COBOL" - the language, while popular and useful now, may not age as well in the future (say 10 or 15 years).

PHP is to the web what Visual Basic is to Windows, but even more so: a powerful enough language to do nearly anything you want, ubiquitous, easy to get up and running (on many web hosts it's pre-installed), and forgiving of shitty code. [...] While I'm happy to see PHP start getting "modern" language bits (you Lisp hackers, stop snickering), the more I'm exposed to modern PHP in practice the more I think it's doomed. [...] A friend compared PHP to the COBOL of the web, and indeed, that seems to be COBOL's philosophy, too.

He also mentions some of the things available for PHP - frameworks, dependency management, PEAR, PECL - and some of his struggles with each. There's plenty of feedback on the post with some good interaction back from the post's author.