[philsturgeon]

Primative Objects for all basic data types would be lovely, but that is another "Wishlist Feature" that may or may not happen at some point.

The point of this article is not "What languages should PHP copy to get better", I am talking about "What PHP developers can do today with the available tools to fix things for tomorrow".

PHP has everything it needs to move to a more package-based way of working, it just needs the community to take it up.

[acabal]

But I think it's exactly these "wishlist features" that make frameworks/packages a necessity in the first place. If PHP had these functions well-implemented and -documented in the core, it wouldn't be necessary to have 10 different flavors of PHP frameworks and packaging systems. That's why you don't see any (or very few) 3rd-party .NET frameworks.

Instead of the community fragmenting again and creating yet another packaging system, the community should contribute directly to the PHP core to eliminate the need for frameworks and package galaxies in the first place. (Though packages would still be useful for lesser-used or shiny and new features.)

Is that practical given the political and code state of the PHP core? Maybe not. But I guess that's why I called it a "dream situation" in my OP.

[philsturgeon]

I think you misunderstand. Packages are not built to fix missing features in the core of a language, they are built for everything else.

OAuth, Authentication, Twitter API interaction, ORM's and all that jazz. None of that fits into the core at all.

You say that if the core of PHP got better then we wouldn't need MVC frameworks? What about things like ASP MVC? PHP is a language. A framework is an architecture that allows websites to be built in a certain way.

Building Composer is not "splintering by building yet another package manager", it is building the package manager we never had. Barely anybody in the community uses PEAR (I have met one PEAR developer ever, and I meet a lot of PHP developers) and there are not other existing options that work.

Composer works, so the more packages can be made generic and reusable instead of just depending on one framework the better it is for the whole community. This is the only way to reduce splintered efforts.

That is all entirely beside the point of "Adding various new good features would be good". Of course it would, but I'm not talking about trying to make every PHP developer learn C and send a pull request. That is outside the scope of this article.

[wilmoore]

With regard to the .net ecosystem, you are mistaken and it seems like you are speculating to prove a broken point.

The open source .net community has adopted NuGet and Microsoft even endorses it by adding support into VS. This is pretty old news actually.

The need for package and dependency management is legit in the php community just as it is in every other language/community.