I'm very interested in this and will be watching to see where this goes. I've just started PHP this summer as an intern at a company that uses it. At first I was really put off by the language, I had never seriously worked with either web languages or languages that used dynamic typing. So many things seemed strange, dated, or even just plain wrong. On top of that, the official documentation is often confusing as far as best practices go and the ~20 year old comments can only add to confusion (though it is neat when one helps out).

All that said, I've come to enjoy the language for what it is. It works seamlessly with HTML/CSS and can provide so much function with little effort put into configuration. Nearly everything I need to be done can be accomplished without frameworks or libraries, maybe just Bootstrap's CSS to make things pretty enough for the end user.

I could see P++ being useful for PHP as a chance at rebranding. PHP horror stories had made me believe it just had to be bad language. If P++ brings all of the good of PHP along with typing and better syntax in general, I believe it would be a much easier sell to devs in a situation like my own.