My good friend Mr Ultra writes that he believes PHP is soon to be an obsolete language because of it’s late adoption of such ever so necessary concepts such as namespaces. I personally will have to disagree.

I believe that the successful adoption of PHP being so high has a direct relation to the amount of new websites that have come to the forefront of this second web. Consider this, without marijuana, would anyone ever start using crack? The answer might be yes, but for the majority of people it’s simply true that PHP is a gateway language and therefore an overabundance of things such as name spaces and public private methods were never really necessary in early cases because projects were simple and confined. I will agree that there certainly are enterprise situations where these rules come into effect, but for the majority of developers who use this platform, these things are not a necessity as they are often scripting more so the programming.

I firmly believe that an over abundance of environment functions, and flexibility with run-time compiled code makes PHP originally an agile function based development language that has only recently introduced object standards. Traditionally it has been an entry point for just about anyone to learn web, and although I realize that we don’t want just anyone behind the reigns of a monster, it has only recently been adopted in large scale projects that would require such low level pragmatic rules.

I am happy that PHP is adopting these properties, but I am even more happy that it will maintain it’s high level ability for people to easily script in an object oriented fashion without being locked into these rules and properties that seem to almost define lower level languages.

With that said, as long as PHP maintains it’s stable implementation curve unlike Actionscript 3, I believe that it will remain at the middle class of the programming eco-system as a very popular choice for developers and web hosting companies.