Feature-wise, yes it's obviously closer to those, but what PHP did originally was wrap a Perl-esque syntax and dynamic environment (dynamic typing, interpreted

Feature-wise, yes it's obviously closer to those, but what PHP did originally was wrap a Perl-esque syntax and dynamic environment (dynamic typing, interpreted code, GC, etc.) around C libraries as its "standard library". It's grown a lot since then, but the C connection still accounts for PHP's standard libraries, despite the big improvements in OOP and newer libraries in the last few years (SPL for example). That is where many design limitations come from, and it's why PHP's standard library is still mostly just a collection of a million functions instead of something more OOP like the Python or Ruby :)