On his blog today, Nick Halstead has posted what he considers the top ten reasons that PHP as a language is still around:

I have recently come across quite a few articles about the current state of PHP. The current situation does seem, on one hand, quite bleak. [...] We need to first educate all PHP programmers that writing in PHP 4 is only going to hold back the language. And that secondly there is a whole world of new features and ways of doing things that are simpler, slicker and more up to date than ever before. I include here a non-definitive top 10 things that a PHP programmer should know about.

A few of the items included in his list involve:

• classes and their use in PHP5 applications
• the flexibility allowed with multiple database support
• the multitude of frameworks currently offered
• debuggers and profilers

...and, my personal favorite, all of the support that the PHP community has. There's plenty of tutorials, forums, websites, user groups - and of course, the manual - that can help out with just about any developer's question.