Closures are new in 5.4, but the reflection api has been there since 5. Indeed, PHP may not be pretty, but it's really good at hacking stuff together that just

Closures are new in 5.4, but the reflection api has been there since 5. Indeed, PHP may not be pretty, but it's really good at hacking stuff together that just works. A lot like shell scripting, although much more maintainable. My biggest beef with PHP is that there is such a chasm between the procedural style at the object oriented one. This is mostly caused by PHP adopting a static class model (a really odd choice for an otherwise highly dynamic language). On the plus side, this tends to cause fewer surprises than you see in languages with a more dynamic object model.