I agree with that. PHP is strongest in areas where it doesn't try to imitate other languages and overload itself on features that are duplicitous or superfluous

I agree with that. PHP is strongest in areas where it doesn't try to imitate other languages and overload itself on features that are duplicitous or superfluous. The last feature that I really loved and anticipated was functions becoming real objects, it's one of the very few things among recent additions that I think were absolutely essential and overdue. It's also nice that FPM is now part of the default package. There are certainly a lot of areas that could be improved - for example it's incredible how they're still not cleaning up the standard library or some of the parser quirks.