If you think that's bad, you should try C sometime.

I have used both for different purposes and I can honestly say conceptually C is a very clean, fast assembly language substitute. If some dumb programmer pulls together 20 C libraries with different semantics and does not properly abstract over them and unify things it's the programmer that's the problem. PHP is fundamentally messy because of just that reason PLUS other significant problems at the language, not library level.

Yeah, I don't really understand this. My first language was C, and all these C-like languages look quite similar in syntax. I never thought these were "pretty," but they don't really stroke an emotional component in me.

My point is that PHP's lack of namespace hierarchy is just like C. In fact, most of PHP's libraries are very close to the underlying C libraries. The lack of apparent organization is mainly due to the fact that PHP pulls all these different, independently-written libraries together. If you were writing C, it would look about the same, except that you'd have to go out and find all these libraries and put them together yourself.

C's libraries aren't terribly well-organized, but, for me at least, the standard ones all fit in one brainful so it's not really a problem.