But I'll try to sum up: PHP was designed as a minimalist, procedural language designed to help occasional programmers write interpreted scripts that run in brief, efficient bursts to generate responses to HTTP requests in a classic CRUD-app context. It's designed to be the perfect language for someone who wants to embed code in a set of HTML templates, upload them to the server, and test them by clicking around and making sure the pages look right.
These are PHP's great strengths, and the reason why it isn't going anywhere. But they are also its weaknesses. Attempts to drag PHP too far out of its sweet spot get gradually more painful until you start to cry and switch to something else.
Today PHP makes me cry because Ruby is so, so much easier to test. Tomorrow there will be a different reason to cry.
That's more of a general (if colorful) perspective on the language's origins and your experiences with it, but I'm wondering what specific features of the language you feel are missing?
I have experience with both PHP and Ruby, by the way, and am lead developer for a very large open source application built in PHP, used mostly for pragmatic reasons, but I am interested in hearing what language features people feel PHP is missing.
Now, let's not go too far.