PHP in 2015 is not what it was in earlier. No one can predict any language's future in next 20 years but PHP community nowadays is better than ever. If PHP survived long enough than expectation I'd give all credits to Taylor Otwell and Jeffrey Way.

Dying to use Laravel on PHP7

I feel that PHP is loosing the battle lately. I barely use php now and so do my friends.

A very interesting question - and closely related to the question of what internet technology will look like in 20 years time. What will scripting languages look like in a world where everything is interconnected and (potentially) 'intelligent', generating unimaginable amounts of data that need to be processed, managed and secured ? Hmmm ... wish I had a crystal ball !

The fact that my bank (a huge coporation) still uses classic ASP (remember that one ?) makes me think PHP will still be around in 20 years time in some shape or form.

Look at this stat - php powers more than 81% of websites today - it really surprised me ! w3techs.com/technologies/overview/programming_lan…

PHP is still a broken language - it kept on evolving without any formal specifications until recently; hence the reason for the mess. If they do fix, it won't be PHP anymore. Either way, I believe it will be mostly extinct in 20 years time, here's my reasoning.

Wikipedia:

Early PHP was not intended to be a new programming language, and grew organically, with Lerdorf noting in retrospect: "I don’t know how to stop it, there was never any intent to write a programming language […] I have absolutely no idea how to write a programming language, I just kept adding the next logical step on the way."[14] A development team began to form and, after months of work and beta testing, officially released PHP/FI 2 in November 1997.

The fact that PHP was not originally designed but instead was developed organically has led to inconsistent naming of functions and inconsistent ordering of their parameters.[15] In some cases, the function names were chosen to match the lower-level libraries which PHP was "wrapping",[16] while in some very early versions of PHP the length of the function names was used internally as a hash function, so names were chosen to improve the distribution of hash values.[17]

What PHP has going for it is its ease of use which means many developers jumped onto the bandwagon even people who've never done any development. I believe JavaScript is now becoming that go-to language or even Python and given enough time, shared hosting companies will start to offer NodeJS alongside Apache and PHP will start to fade.

PHP's initial claim to fame was in its acronym, Personal Home Page which later changed to the recursive acronym PHP Hypertext Preprocessor. The age of needing a Hypertext Preprocessor is long gone, browsers are powerful enough to do all that stuff now with JavaScript (so normal HTML + JS + CSS is the future of static pages instead of PHP) and blogs / forums as well as personal pages are fading fast from the web thanks to social networks - blogs and forums used to be all PHP.

Looking at this graph, PHP's popularity has been in steady decline over the last 10 years: tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/PHP.ht…

Compared to Java which is a well designed language, Java's popularity has shot through the roof in the last few years and if you go by what has happened in history so far, Python (which is also a well designed language) is much more likely to become a successor to PHP as a scripting language as it already almost replaced perl when it came along. tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index.…

You can argue that Zend and HHVM and other variants are developed by large companies - actually those are just stop gaps to fill the holes that PHP could never fill.

So my verdict is that in 20 years, PHP will be one of the legends that everyone knows about, but nobody uses anymore. That's obviously assuming we'll still be using websites in 20 years time and normal computers, if we don't, it could spell the doom for many more languages.

Edit: Abandoned websites will always be around, here are some samples from around 1995:

warnerbros.com/archive/spacejam/movie/jam.htm

home.mcom.com/home/welcome.html

edition.cnn.com/US/OJ

deniro.jvlnet.com

youvegotmail.warnerbros.com/cmp/0frameset.html

3riversstadium.com/index2.html

toastytech.com/evil

Not in a form we know PHP today. If large companies (like Facebook) uses it (HHVM) it will be forked and made better. It really just needs a talented team who can make it better but it won't be called PHP anymore. JavaScript is a trend but I don't think that will last either because the community gets more and more diverse, frameworks are released almost daily.

New languages. This is the key. Something new will come as always. In the beginning when PHP started, tech was evolving slowly. So it lasted a lot because it was the perfect time to start a programming language but nowadays it is way harder to keep up with the trending stuff. New languages like Go focus on making the language itself modern and the community good and exclusive.

I have a tip that the Apple-backed Swift will last longer than the languages we know today but that is just a personal tip.

Also if you look at the startup scene today, you won't really see startups written with PHP. If someone writes a codebase in PHP, he is considered oldschool in Silicon Valley and lame. And this generation will form the next 20 years if you think about it.

Conclusion: It will be around but mostly as a fork, not the base language

It's an interesting question. I think there might be PHP in 20 years. But not as dominant as today. It will be more like a forgotten language which was used on the old days of the web.

Javascript is trending rapidly right now. And with ES6/Next evolving more and more. Besides that, i think that the web in 20 years will be more about native browser apps then html / php websites.

However I think PHP will be solid for the next few years, it is still very popular.