Yes, php is more checklist complete than it was a few years ago, but there's still quite a bit of ugliness in the language. For example, you mention * clos

Yes, php is more checklist complete than it was a few years ago, but there's still quite a bit of ugliness in the language. For example, you mention * closures (including support for $this) I looked at this a couple days ago, because closures make a lot of problems easier. However, PHP's handling of closures is more than a bit ugly and hackish. Yes, it supports $this, but this was done after the initial release, doesn't give much confidence in how it's handled under the hood. Plus, you have some real syntactic ugliness; in order to scope variables into a closure, you have to declare them again with a now overloaded keyword -- use -- with them passed by value by default. Closures in pretty much any other language, you just put them in the scope of your function and the compiler/interpreter knows how to handle them without any hints from you. While php is less bad now, there's still quite a bit of ugliness in it due to its tendency to just spackle new parts on without any regard for what the end result looks and functions like. The php team needs to make a concerted effort to clean the language of its rough points, even if it breaks backwards compatibility, otherwise, useful ideas will continue to be hampered by an overbloated ugly core.