A video of a keynote presentation by Pierre Joye and Johann-Peter Hartmann's entitled "PHP: Yesterday's Scala and the Cobol of Tomorrow" has been posted online here:

IPC10 – PHP: Yesterdays Scala and the Cobol of tomorrow?

The keynote was delivered during the International PHP Conference (2010) in Mainz. In the presentation, both gentlemen who are core PHP developers discuss the past, present and future of the PHP language. They argue that Scala currently delivers what PHP promised to do so represents a target for PHP to aim towards, while Cobol which has been on life support for decades represents a state that PHP has to work hard to avoid.

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Updated 2022 : note that the above post was originally published in 2011, but is left here for archival purposes.