[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.