I am a 9 years PHP coder (not just LAMP) and also 2 years Node.js coder. I love both stack of technologies. What I think that makes the PHP great is not the language itself, but the community behind it. I found the community tends to be very open and constantly roll out great libraries. I remember back in the days when Ruby on Rails just hit the street, people all want to do "everything written in Rails and MVC" type of thing. But very soon PHP comes up with many MVC type of frameworks. Now, I found history repeats itself. Everyone seems to do "everything written in Node.js and Async fashion" type of thing. But again PHP comes up with an array of libraries that obviously inspired by Node.js. And I am one of the member in the PHP community to be in this process today. Check out all the following great things in PHP 1. Composer: http://getcomposer.org/ Node style package management 2. DNode protocol for PHP https://github.com/bergie/dnode-php 3. PHP-UV, a PHP extension to talk to libuv, the core library behind Node.js 4. Pupcake, an early effort to make PHP perform Node.js type of functionalities https://github.com/superjimpupcake/Pupcake 5. React, Event-driven, non-blocking I/O with PHP ... It is all about community. If the community can continue with the momentum and willingness to listen to the cool stuffs happening outside of PHP and keep improving itself, PHP will continue growing and survive, otherwise, it will go nowhere.