In a recent post to his blog, Matthew Turland refutes the rumor that’s been floating around that PHP is “on the way out” for serious web development work.

Someone I know is apparently of the opinion that PHP is “on the way out.” I have to vehemently disagree with this, and not just because PHP is my language of preference.

He brings up points about major companies employing lots of PHP developers, how the numbers on usage support its place in the programming community and how large companies (like Zend, Oracle and IBM) are starting to take notice and even collaborate on PHP-centric projects of their own. Things like the Zend Core for Oracle and the FastCGI add-on for Microsoft’s IIS system all show a turn of corporations towards PHP, towards a language not “on the way out” but growing steadily more popular each day.