Sorry if i offended you. I really did not try to imply this has to do with trendiness, but it was a frustrated outbreak from my end. I've seen way too many poisonous hater comments against everything PHP here since I started visiting.
I myself use (besides PHP) C#, Javascript, Python, and recently revisited C++ to check out C++11 (I am thrilled). I have been working developing in mainly PHP since 1999 so I have seen most of it's ugly sides.
This thread however was about PHP, not wether Java is good or bad.
If you want to order your program in a specific way, you introduce the appropriate level of abstraction. Same as with any other language.
EDIT: i totally agree that the standard functions are a complete mess in PHP. But they have to stay around for backwards compatibility. Have a look at the SPL classes: http://php.net/manual/en/book.spl-types.php
Perhaps time to revisit PHP some time then? It also has become more mature :)
Much of PHP's old built-in functions are crap (side effects, inconsistent parameter order, wierd naming), but you can't really (and shouldn't) compare those parts with another language as there is no correlation.
PHP does not have type hint for their internal datatypes (int, float, string). Only array is supported. Type hinting for your custom datatypes is supported, when used as function arguments.
Also hack introduces type hint for function return type.
This is great news for the PHP community, and I for one applaud their effort. Contrary to what many HN hipsters seems to believe, PHP is quite a capable language, and HHVM / Hack is really pushing things forward.
* Hack introduces type hinting, imo the major lacking part in PHP.
* HHVM introduces speed to php. On a personal project calculating perlin noise, I got about 8x speedup on HHVM.
* The specification helps pave the way for more implementations of PHP.
The debian package maintainer of ffmpeg was/is one of the libav guys and decided to replace ffmpeg with libav.
Judging by several frustrated comments in this thread, it has obviously been a hurtful decision.
A package called "ffmpeg" has been in debian forever now, and running it's binary claims that "ffmpeg is deprecated", which is a complete lie.
EDIT: also see "FFmpeg and a thousand fixes" [1], suggesting that FFmpeg is working hard improving the security situation, while libav mainly ignored the effort.