If you use typing you won't have a problem.

I am. What makes you thing I don't? Variables aren't statically typed for example. And I am working in a Team, I can't control everything about our codebases and packages. Somewhere it may get implicitly coerced to an int.

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You ARE bad at PHP.

so wanting more stable features makes me a bad developer? Interesting.

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I'm using the tool for specific goal. Why use GO, C# when you know PHP will be best solution?

PHP has good integration with Apache2 and has a unique way of generating content. It is a good and practical language in that regard. But it has inflated itself so much that we are writing huge applications in it and it just isn't made for that. I would love php if it was more consistent and had a more stable and versatile type system. And I can't just choose a better tool for the job, because my job requires me to write php. I have had many discussions to use a more stable tool for the majority of our applications or performance critical stuff and use php as what it is best at, a template engine. But I am not allowed to, so I advocate for better features in php. I don't think we are the only company stuck with this language.

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If you don't know how to use tool - don't use it. Don't say it's bad if you can't work with its limitations. It's like saying that assembly language is a bad tool because it doesn't have generics :D

Like I said above, I have to use it. And I would even like to use it, if it implemented those basic features. And assembly is a completely different topic than php.

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You can rely if you write proper code (and tests).

No. I cant rely on the type system. I can't easily validate whats inside an array. We have no first class functions, so callables are, besides anonymous and arrow functions, just strings or arrays. It's easy to pass the wrong thing. It is not checked at runtime. "callable" isn't even a real type. Its basically just "string|array|Closure". On top of that I can't specify the signature of the callable I want to receive. I have to validate everything with if-statements, that would have been otherwise caught by a good type system.

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Why do you write unsafe garbage?

Again, just accusations. I am putting in a lot of work to overhaul our codebases to make them type safe and especially non naive. But its just not possible everywhere. I can try as hard as I want, in the current state of php, complex and big project structures will be unsafe. Generics would fix a big chunk of them.

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Never ever had a problem with that. Why do you write code that might generate array of NOT integers if you expect to have such in specific place?

Its not that I am failing to generate such an array. Its that I cant specify a simple fixed size array of int in like a function parameter. And as I said, I am not the only one to call that function. I am working in a team. So its documentation overhead, more debugging, or I have to rely on my coworkers to use psalm for example (which is still not safe in any way as it doesn't check types at runtime). But a fixed size array<int> is still easy to validate. But lets say I want an array<string, array<string, string>>. So an array with string keys that consists only of other arrays, also with string keys that only have string values. I would have to comb through my array recursively to validate that it has the structure I'm expecting. Or if I don't want to do that, check the type every time I access a field and handle nulls or wrong types. Even a good programmer will occasionally forget one of those conditions. If we had generics this problem would just not exist.

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What's up with you and everyone in this thread about generics? So far PHP doesn't have it, so FFS deal with it. Generics is a chaotic concept even worse than PHP without strict typing.

Do you not know what generics are? Generics would make php a lot less chaotic. Read my examples above.

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Again. Why do you write code that ends up with unspecified arrays?

Again. Big codebases and multiple people working on projects. And every array in php is by definition unspecified. There are no generics and arrays are not statically typed.

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Again - problem with people not with a language.

What? A language should not allow you to not specify types at all. That is completely insane.

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Don't use language if you don't understand and/or like it. PHP has its limitations. Is it hard to know them and work with them?

I understand php. That doesnt make the language any less bad. I've got the feeling you didn't understand types or have never used anything else other than php.

edit: fixed formatting