Over on his blog today, Marcus Whitney has a new posting discussing what it really means that PHP has become objectified with version 5.

So, what makes PHP 5 an official object oriented language now? Some say reflection, others say iterators. Type hinting is certainly a nice touch, and namespaces would make packaging much better. Truthfully - there isn't anything that makes PHP 5 a more official OOP language than PHP4. All of the differences are in the new things that the language supports, but PHP 4 had the primary requirement: Classes . The same old PHP 4 objects run just fine in the Zend Engine 2, with maybe the exception of the way that ZE2 does pass-by-reference in functions and methods by default. In truth, PHP5 won't be any more object oriented than PHP 4 if the developers don't aspire to get a better understanding of the precepts and concepts of object oriented programming itself.

[...] PHP programmers simply must become more knowledgable about programming in general, and object oriented programming in particular in order to make sense of the great new object model in PHP 5.

He also states that one of the weak points in the PHP community is software development. While I partially agree, I don't think that, on the whole, the larger PHP applications that are out there are in such bas shape. Sure there are a few bad eggs out there that have messed things a bit lately for those looking at the PHP community, but there are 10 other stronger apps just looking to take its place...