PHP being largely targeted st web app development is a bonus: how many times do ruby apps need to rely on a swath of gems to achieve functionality PHP has in its standard distributed extensions?
It just like Morse Code which designed for telegram operators to send and receive message.
By that time when telegram was new, it was a good invention, everyone who wants to use telegram must know Morse Code. And because of it's designed for telegram, it come with every each bonus to make send and receive telegram faster.
However, one day, a new technology been invented, it's called Telephone. Not long after that, telegram started to fade away.
What fade away with it, is of course, the Morse Code. Because it only good at sending and receiving telegrams which not many people still do today.
Now the PHP. It has a lot of old burdens (To make it good at outputting HTTP respond) and poor design decisions. They need to find a way to organize those things and carefully redesign that language. Then, maybe it can become respectable.
It's just like no one had motive to make HTML turing-complete. A language dedicated as a web script is good enough as long as it output web page, right? :(
BTW:
> I claim that PHP’s simpler “think; edit; reload the page” cycle makes developers more productive.
Does this can be simulated by automatically recompile and restart the application? I don't think it can be an serious advantage here.