Lists can only have integer keys? Fo reals? So I have to use a Map instead?? Who designed these objects??
computer scientists! hahahaha...
In PHP you basically have one data structure available: an ordered Hash Map. They term it an array, which can be confusing for people who expect arrays to behave a certain way, since it's not really an array at all.
Java gives you a diverse set of containers to address a diverse set of problems efficiently.
I agree that the syntax for a lot of Java data structure allocation and initialization sucks compared to php (even more so to python, ruby, etc), but that's a different issue...or is it?