PHP has the wind in its sails or what? last month i got pointed to PH7 ( http://ph7.symisc.net/quick_intro.html ) which is an embeddable PHP interpreter (bytecode compiler + VM) for C/C++/Objective C host applications (amazing piece of work) and now I'm investigating this stuff.
Absolutely. The dams of NIH have begun to break down. (I've started to see teams use things like Compass instead of conclude "But I have to install Ruby?")
People are collaborating on actually finally decent solutions (Composer, PHPSpec2, Behat). I see people relying less and less upon PHP's bloated, arcane and mostly dangerous standard library, instead building reusable chunks of PHP with surprisingly acceptable (comparably beautiful) design (Goutte, Twig, Doctrine).
Drupal, which I have managed to end end up working with full time for the last few years, has finally stopped (poorly) reinventing everything it touches: http://www.garfieldtech.com/blog/off-the-island-2013 and I expect that trend to continue.
We are starting to have a decent forward-thinking and flexible frameworks and projects like PHPBB have started actually using them.
I've also seen people actually using IDEs, writing docs, specifying argument types and being aware of the concept of stepping debuggers.
Facebook has sponsored enough alternate implementations of the interpreter that I've begun to lose track, charting the massive room for improvements.
Things are genuinely starting to look better; I still lose sleep over my tools and hoop-jump laden development workflow, but I actually have hope that I might not have to by this time next year.
