PHP is not a language that was designed to be a language. It was originally a set of scripts that slowly morphed into a kind-of language. Because of that, PHP l

PHP is not a language that was designed to be a language. It was originally a set of scripts that slowly morphed into a kind-of language. Because of that, PHP lacks a lot of the language features (threads, namespaces, proper OO design from the ground up) that "serious" languages all have. Ruby was buit to be the best language Matz could think of. Erlang was built to be a great language for programming telecoms. None of the "serious" languages morphed out of some CGI scripts. As I already mentioned, PHP is not an OO language. It is a language that has OO as a feature, but the core API is not OO. This creates a very awkward mix of OO and procedural code. One of the most embarrassing things about PHP comes from its complete lack of naming and ordering conventions. Look at the array functions. http://us.php.net/manual/en/ref.array.php http://us.php.net/manual/en/ref.array.php 47 of these functions start with array_, 25 of them are a mismatch of whole words and partial words that happen to do array functions. The reason PHP documentation is so good is out of necessity. Without fantastic documentation, PHP would be completely unusable due to this staggering oversight.