In one of the more exciting speeches at the PHPCon 2002 West that happened from the 21st through the 24th - there was quite a stir in the community about PHP and a VM called Parrot.

For those interested, you can check out this PDF of Sterling and Thies' speech at PHPCon on the subject of PHP and the integration of these VMs, and how they effect the future of PHP.

It seems that everyone's talking about it, too - including PHPEverywhere:
I presume that PHP-Hacked is the patched PHP that Sterling and Thies released in August. I have been a sceptic about Perl 6 because it has taken so long, but this is impressive stuff.
, and John Coggeshall
Although there was a ton at PHP-CON (much more then I care to really re-hash here), one of the more interesting developements came at the end with Theis and Sterling's closing keynote on a new project we have lovingly dubbed "Pharrot"..

One interesting quote that's very encouraging for the PHP community from John's weblog: "Basically, Pharrot/Parrot/Perl 6 is the open source version of the .NET stuff Microsoft is pushing (they were at the conference btw, we all talked with them extensively). I think the project might have some real merit..."