One advantage it does have is apps can auto update and extend themselves. Eg, wordpress makes extending it with 3rd party plugins extremely painless from a user

One advantage it does have is apps can auto update and extend themselves. Eg, wordpress makes extending it with 3rd party plugins extremely painless from a user perspective. As for not being able to access a array directly from a function which returns the array. It's just syntactical sugar. Yes long over due syntactical sugar however.