Great post. @Jos3000 makes a good point. It might be far easier to make an interesting (read: not utterly banal) language that compiles to PHP than it would be to create yet another language (a real hammer) and make it so popular that its pervasiveness would make it attractive to the masses. CoffeeScript is a good example of a language that compiles to JS and actually makes it a better alternative to plain JavaScript. And there is already a few languages that compile to PHP as well (Fructose, Pharen, HaXe). But none of them really convinced me so far. Still, I'm eager to see more of those compilers appear in the future. I believe there is a huge market for such a language.