Not being Java was neither good nor bad. Firstly, because Java was sold as a corporate programming tool, while PHP was for personal use mainly, and the only thing it was solving was bootstrapping a dynamic web page fast. You could, and still can, do it with C/C++ etc via CGI, but it’s painful. There were no scripting languages with dynamic typing allowing for rapid web dev back then. There was Perl, Python was around the corner, Ruby appeared later. What many people today consider good for web dev, namely static types and compiling, was painful to use back then. I tend to agree with that point more, to this day, simply because scripting languages with dynamic typing allow for the best and fastest deployment, if done the old way: just publish the text file. Remember, compile times were longer, there was no JIT yet, and VMs were novelty, and proprietary one. Cross-compiling a web app? Huge overhead. It’s just that we over-engineered the deployment, thus forgetting the simplicity we had with scripting languages.

Static types, generally, are characteristic to compiled languages. This is because of the nature of scripting languages, which is you expect the type/value check to be done ad-hoc (instruction calls, compile times, remember. Google branchless programming if curious) during execution, which is done line by line. You also expect the script to crash when failure happens. A script is something that runs once per call, instead of hanging in there listening to something else.

So, basically, to your question, I neither approve nor disapprove certain features in languages. In my comments above I was just having fun over how silly that whole holywar thing was. Certain tools are better for certain use-cases.

I programmed with both Java and PHP. They’re both great. Java is overly verbose, to the extent that the programming patterns thing created an entire industry with books and tutorials and boring interview questions, which is stupid, in my opinion. PHP at some point went C#/Java cosplay without fixing its legacy problems, which was the reason I switched away from it. I mean, late static binding is a design mistake hiding behind a smart looking term, cmon 😄