Classes are better, but they still have no namespaces. Everything is in one global namespace.

Just being devils advocate for a minute: How is this different from Perl?

Perl mangles the package and class concepts together - it doesn't really have namespaces either (in the sense they are used in C#, C++, Smalltalk, etc.)

It's different because I, as a Perl programmer, don't have to worry about the next function name I choose colliding with any of over 3000 built-ins or any function defined in any file I might ever want to include.

It's different because I, as a Perl programmer, don't have to worry about the next function name I choose colliding with any of over 3000 built-ins or any function defined in any file I might ever want to include.

Don't PHP classes solve exactly that problem? For example:

<?php

class foo {
  function hello() {
    print "hello world\n";
  }
}

class bar {
  function hello() {
    print "greetings planetary body\n";
  }
}

foo::hello();
bar::hello();

?>
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Can't you treat PHP classes like Perl packages?

(Disclaimer: I'm not a PHP coder so I'm probably missing something blatant ;-)