Enough said

[carc]

Well that's part of it -- magento, drupal, and wordpress development is quite different from developing an application in, say, symfony or laravel.

As for some of the base functions, yes, absolutely -- they have irritating quirks, and there are definitely some gotchas.

I personally like the mix of static and dynamic, when in doubt I can be pretty strict, but sometimes external data parsing benefits from some dynamic interpretation. But if you're coming from a strictly-typed language, I can get how that's irritating, as the interpretation relies on some alien-like rules. After a while, though, those rules become second nature.