But PHP does come with lots of built-in functions for stuff like secure sessions, templates, output filtering, and shelling out! A lot of them aren't really de

But PHP does come with lots of built-in functions for stuff like secure sessions, templates, output filtering, and shelling out! A lot of them aren't really designed well or cohesively, but you could argue that the fact they exist and are bundled with PHP causes people to not look for better third party libraries, which can evolve and not need to eternally keep all old functions for backwards compatibility. (I have a similar complaint about Python. Python has both urllib and urllib2 bundled with it, and neither are that great, but the number of different ways to install 3rd party Python libraries appears to be ridiculous -- pip, distutils, setuptools, virtualenv, easy_install... -- which lead to me just avoiding them and settling for the built-in things when I use Python.) Node has a great package manager for easily using 3rd party libraries, keeping them up-to-date, and avoiding dependency hell between different applications. The package manager is bundled with Node, so all libraries use the same system and people are encouraged to look for (and make) libraries for what they need. Rust also has a recommended package manager: Cargo.