I'm not sure where to begin with all this. It's late and been a long day so I will try and follow up most of this tomorrow morning. However, to your first set

I'm not sure where to begin with all this. It's late and been a long day so I will try and follow up most of this tomorrow morning. However, to your first set of points .. Where you call pre-populated global variables "language constructs". They are not. PHP calls them "super globals". These are global variables mapped from the GET/POST/Cookie client headers into the server environment by the PHP SAPI, for instance the Apache SAPI. PHP has many SAPIs, including a command line one, which doesn't populate these globals for obvious reasons. Oh and FastCGI for PHP is provided by a SAPI as well (nothing to do with the standard library). Oh and quickly - "I was comparing PHP's standard library features with those of Django." Can I pick a PHP framework of choice and start comparing it to Python?