Objects: Why are they useful?

[eluser]Nick Husher[/eluser]

It was also beacuse of this post http://ellislab.com/forums/viewthread/69407/ that I started to wonder about objects vs arrays.

One thing that PHP (and Javascript, and many 'scripting' languages) have that other, more-traditional languages have is that they can create complex associative data structures on the fly. In Java and C++, it's difficult and unwieldy to build a data structure that contains multiple nested properties and it doesn't buy you much in the way of expressivity.

So with PHP, it's not always useful to build a complex object structure; it just takes a long time without buying you any elegance.