Yeah the idea is to have something that hopefully paves over the rough parts, and who knows? One day this might be similar to what PHP will look like in the future (in a galaxy far, far away)

Actually, it is possible that PHP in the near future will look like this. I, nikic, and some others, want to add methods to primitive types.

not going to happen ,because PHP relies to much on native extensions. If a fork doesnt work with them , it will not be successfull. The best one can do is move to Python , which works on an httpd server and is a real multipurpose language, and it has a lot of support on shared hosts.