One trouble with judging PHP like that is that the namespace features are so very new and almost universally loathed* that classes are/were the only widely-used

One trouble with judging PHP like that is that the namespace features are so very new and almost universally loathed* that classes are/were the only widely-used form of namespace encapsulation. In a language like Python, it's not uncommon to be far more discriminating about what is a class and what is just implemented using functions. That design is lost on PHP really. *I disagree with the loathing. The backslash is a bit ugly but life goes on.