Java is built around OOP - you can't not use object in Java. You can do OOP in Perl, but I have always found it's syntax very awkward, and never got used to it. PHP has a Java-like syntax for classes, which made it very simple for me to transition to. It lacks function overloading, but it largely makes up for that by supporting default arguments for functions. PHP takes arrays and hashtables and merges the two.
Any array can act as a standard array, a hashtable, or both.
Using this data structure, you can get around Perl's and Java's hashtable limitation of not being able to retrieve the data in a defined order - pull it out either by numeric index or by key name. Strings can Span Lines. A big timesaver if you use long SQL statements. You can also use Perl's style of single quotes to enclose strings if you don't want variables in that string to be interpolated. After moving from PHP 3.x to 4.0 beta 3, I got access to Perl-compatible regexing.