I'd say the future is bright, especially considering the performance increases in PHP7. Now it's both super productive with its huge ecosystem and fast enough for any but the very largest of sites.

> The first and the most probable trend is the complete dominance of PHP 7.x in all aspects of PHP development.

I don't see how this conclusion follows from anything in the article. As long as big players (specifically WordPress) hold down minimum version requirements, and shared hosting providers decline to upgrade, a very large percentage of PHP will still be run in pre-7.0 environments.

The professional PHP types will go to 7.0, but people developing commercially for WordPress are kind of stuck. And people developing professionally for WordPress are ~25% of the PHP ecosystem, if I had to guess.

As much as it pains me, I wouldn't be surprised to see it take until 2019 or 2020 for PHP7 to truly displace PHP 5.x. It took PHP 4 that long to disappear.

I think PHP needs to get async/await as soon as possible. I don't know how well it works in Hack but PHP7 was supposed to be written with asynchronous tasks in mind but I didn't see anything concrete since then.

A lot of NodeJs code is written just to parallelize API/DB calls and I'm sure PHP would be sufficient in a lot of cases.

I know there's libraries but good luck getting widespread enterprise adoption of those.

Please die?