On the Web Builder Zone, Giorgio Sironi has a few suggestions about things that aren't really needed in object-oriented development but seem to have found their way in none the less (most of them are in PHP too).

It is in general true that you should strive for writing code as simple as possible (in length but in complexity too) to obtain an end result specified by a requirement or a user story. If there are two designs for a feature, almost always we would choose the simplest. This article takes a broader view on object-oriented programming, and ask the following question: What are the constructs we don't need in an object-oriented language? What we can take away without hampering our capabilities of building software?

He has a whole list of things that he thinks could be removed - "extra features" that wouldn't cause heartache if dropped including:

• instanceof
• break/continue
• protected subclassing scope
• if (conditional)
• switch (conditional chain)
• public (for fields)