Let me put it this way: Lisp hackers think that one of the major problems with Emacs Lisp is that it basically uses one big namespace for everything, forcing awkward naming conventions and contortions to avoid collisions. That is possibly the one part of any Lisp that works like PHP ... and the Lisp community pretty much universally agrees that it's a bad idea, not because it's like PHP, but because it's a bad idea.

Also you should check out what Alan Storm has to say about this: http://alanstorm.com/python_imports_for_php_developers

Mr. Storm is a crackerjack PHP developer: perhaps you will listen to him.