> I'm not entirely sure if PHP was fast at acquiring new features. You really have turn back the clock; languages didn't have package management back then. Th

> I'm not entirely sure if PHP was fast at acquiring new features. You really have turn back the clock; languages didn't have package management back then. They didn't have packages. The only exception, at the time, was Perl (which had CPAN). PHP acquiring features was not just about language features but also how quickly it's standard library grew to accomplish anything you needed on the web. > PHP didn't have classes until version 4 iirc. Namespace in 5.4? And 5.x is around NodeJS early days where RoR and Python Django/Pylon/Pyramid was around. I'm actually talking about the PHP3 era; by the time we're talking about PHP5 then there was already plenty of competition and the "early days" were already long over.