What we are trying to achieve with Composer ( http://getcomposer.org ) & Packagist ( http://packagist.org ) is to bring PHP to a higher level by encouraging sharing of small libraries. Encouraging re-use by making it dead easy to publish a package and depend on others. This means less wheel reinventing, and overall people get more time to work on their one specialized lib instead of having to write boilerplate crap over and over again. So we end up with higher quality libs, and everyone wins. That does not directly fix the language, but it helps a lot by abstracting crappy C-like functions under much more usable OO APIs. Curl has wrappers, GD/Imagemagick too, streams are coming. This creates a nicer "DSL" on top of PHP, so that all you're left with from core is the language syntax and a few string and array manipulation functions that are not as consistent as they could be, but it's not so hard to learn if you use them every day. I find we these are exciting times to be writing PHP.