I'll give you that. No clear direction. As I thought about this a little more in Ruby you have Matz, Python has Guido, Scala has Odersky, C# has Anders (those are just those that come to mind and I'm not sure of the current involvement). I can't think of who PHP really has like this. Rasmus maybe, but I don't think it's the same as the other languages I mentioned--understandably so due to other projects/engagements.