Coming from someone who didn't start with PHP. Has used a variety of other programming languages. And programs in PHP daily I will say that it fails in many imp

Coming from someone who didn't start with PHP. Has used a variety of other programming languages. And programs in PHP daily I will say that it fails in many important respects and will for some time to come. The first things that come to mind are functional programming (it has some abilities but is fairly quirky and harder to read than other languages). Being able to use array_map or array_reduce is useful in many places but certainly not elegant in PHP. Code reuse is also not that easy with PHP (though traits may fix it, but we don't use PHP 5.4 yet because it's seemed fairly problematic for us in production) and the need for autoloaders is somewhat insane once you've used a language with an actual package system. It doesn't have a mature dependency management system (though Composer is currently an up and comer). It's great for small projects but horrible to maintain at large scale - and this is from someone who has written 100K+ line programs in PHP.