I know I am basically dangeling meat into lions den with this question; How has PHP7 done in regards to the Modules section or modularity he speaks of?
I am interested in genuine and objective replies of course.
(Yes your joke is probably very funny and I am sure it's a novel and exciting quip about the state of affairs in 2006 when wordpress was the flagship product)
PHP 5.3 (2009) added a (simple, static) namespace system. Composer (2012) has built a sophisticated package management infrastructure on top of this.
However, PHP doesn't have a module system, for better or worse. Namespaces merely deal with name collisions and adding prefixes for you. Encapsulation only exists within classes and functions, not within packages. PHP has no concept of namespaced variables, only classes, functions and constants. Two versions of the same package cannot be loaded simultaneously if they occupy the same namespace.
There has been some relatively recent discussion about having, for example, intra-namespace visibility modifiers (e.g. https://externals.io/message/91778#92148). PHP may yet grow modules. The thing is, though, all sorts of things are suggested all the time. Many PHP 7 features had been suggested many years before (https://ajf.me/talks/2015-10-03-better-late-than-never-scala...). The reason PHP 7 has them is people took the initiative to implement them.
Haven't used PHP in more than a decade so I looked up the documentation. The most relevant parts I could find were "Classes and Objects" and "Namespaces". After a rough review, I'd say that the it is possible that PHP inner classes provide one of the most rudimentary components of "type theoretic modules" in a partial and likely broken way. I don't mean this as a diss at PHP—it's just hard to do it right.
Namespaces also provide something similar to "type theoretic modules" but they provide only the very most prosaic, simple, and unimportant function: namely, namespacing.
I suspect that the closest thing to the kind of modules that Graydon is talking about would be ML's modules[0], but I can't find any information on PHP7's modules so I can't speak for how similar they are (though knowing PHP's dynamic nature I doubt they're particularly similar).
There's probably an interesting discussion to be had about the merits of shipping fast with a few killer features and taking your time layer in comparison to well thought out initial features.
PHP is probably a great language now. I used it in the PHP 4 and 5 days. Coming from Perl, that was particularly painful.
I am interested in genuine and objective replies of course.
(Yes your joke is probably very funny and I am sure it's a novel and exciting quip about the state of affairs in 2006 when wordpress was the flagship product)