Marco Tabini (of php|architect magazine) has posted some of his thoughts on why PHP just might be the "new Java" in the upcoming year.

Historically, PHP has been developed following the scratch-an-itch method [...]. This development process makes for some haphazard functionality, and has, in the past, been the source of many annoyances that need to be handled with extreme care.

He does mention some of the good things that have come out of this process like OOP in PHP4, SimpleXML functionality and type hinting but warns that if things swing too much the other way (planning out everything, only adding things by committee) that PHP might swerve towards a dangerous precedent - the Java community's mentality.

Adding even more to the huge namespaces debates going on, Padraic Brady has some of his opinions posted to his blog on the subject.

The problem isn't that namespaces are bad, it's that these arcane structures seem to have so little impact on development in PHP today for many many people. Does that mean it's unimportant?

He talks about the real value of namespaces, a comparison to type hinting's inclusion, the current amount of (needless?) traffic on the php.internals list and his opinions on why namespaces are valid.