I’ve been looking into the object oriented features of PHP. Version 5, released a couple of years ago, introduced an almost complete (see below) set of features that turned PHP into a fully-fledged member of the OO club. I think PHP’s greatest problem in this respect is that many existing developers don’t see the need to change their practices so radically and fans of OO often regard PHP as somehow beneath them.
The fact is that PHP is an extremely capable language. It’s true that it remains dynamically typed (tut tut I hear the OO “experts” exhaling from here) which means that you don’t have to declare variables and give them a type (eg String) before using them. It also lacks namespaces but, frankly who gives a monkeys about that?
I’m finding PHP a breath of fresh Object Oriented air: the ideal combination of a full set of features whilst remaining easy to learn and use and extremely productive.
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