[jnankin]

I think part of this is the fact that there are a myriad of functions that are just "baked in" to the language, making it a little chaotic. Sometimes it seems like some PHP contributer needed some function and just decided to add it to the language. (Examples: rsort, sort, http_build_query, rawurldecode, urldecode, etc.)

There should be Util or Helper libraries that do that, and in a much more organized way. On the flip side, these commonly used functions are written in C, so they're most likely faster than if you were to write your own in php or load a library.

Either way, I love PHP and use Symfony for all of my projects. PHP/Symfony is pretty much like rails but without the cracked out ruby syntax.