I was talking to a colleague recently and he said PHP died when senior devs were no longer able to say, "we're building it in PHP" and be taken seriously. I think there's truth in that.

I also think it's interesting how many TS advocates seem to have popped up in this thread. I find Java to be a lovely language and I think it's fair to say generally most developers agree Java is a well designed language with a mature ecosystem backing it, but I've never met a passionate Java developer. But I hear there was a time many years ago when Java was the hot new technology in town and naming your crappy new language, "Java"Script was considered a good marketing strategy.