Laura Thomson has a new post today with a quote that I actually laughed out loud at the first time I read it:

Today we had a seminar from Dave Lemphers, who is a Developer Evangelist from Microsoft in Melbourne.

He talked about upcoming stuff coming out of Microsoft, but the most memorable line of the talk from my perspective was when he was talking about Visual Studio 2005. He said "For those that don't know, ASP.NET is our PHP-style technology". :) How the world has changed.

Just the fact that a Microsoft rep would say something like this is great, but even better is that it shows that PHP really is becoming the powerful force that we'd all hoped for so long. Even is there was some humor on his part, the fact that he knows what PHP is and feels like it's important enough to mention is a wonderful thing. PHP has been growing by leaps and bounds, and with so much of the web these days saturated with Apache and PHP already installed, it's only going to grow more and more.

Thanks to all of those out there that have had their hands in making PHP what it is today - not only the developers of the core, but also PEAR library authors, PHP software developers, and all of those that stretch the limits of the language every day...