> On Jan 15, 2015, at 6:51 AM, Andrea Faulds <a...@ajf.me> wrote:
> 
> 
> I’m not really sure this is true. I agree that strict types aren’t entirely 
> in keeping with the “PHP way”. However, there are plenty of people who are 
> against them not for that reason, but simply because they don’t work well for 
> them. Plus, I’m not sure strict typing causes as much of a problem if it is 
> off by default. Nobody is forced to use it, the language would stay 
> beginner-friendly and weakly-typed. Indeed, strict type hints don’t stop PHP 
> being weakly-typed. They just check types at function call boundaries. Think 
> of it as a sanity check.
> 
> 
> Let’s have a look. From a quick skim over the thread for v0.1:
> 
> * In favour of weak types (or the RFC anyway): Adam, Stas, yourself, Jordi, 
> Pierre,
> * Against, in favour of strict types: Maxime, Nikita, Markus, Marco, Leigh, 
> Levi, Sven(?)
> * In favour of strict types, not against weak types as compromise: Matthew
> * Somewhat in favour: Sebastian
> * In favour of allowing both approaches: Marcio, Thomas, Marco
> 
> I apologise if I am misrepresenting anyone’s position.
> 
> This is unlikely to be super-representative of the PHP community. However, 
> I’m not sure I’d say “overwhelmingly positive”. It can be easy to get 
> confirmation bias when reading RFC threads.
> 
> It is very clear to me that a lot of people would like strict types, and some 
> people would like weak types. As to their relative numbers, I cannot say.
> 
> I don’t think it’s really fair to cover only the use case of one half of the 
> PHP community. The other half counts too. This is a rather divisive issue.

Man, oh man. I thought we finally had a proposal with 0.1 that everyone could 
give a thumbs up to and move forward. One that enables stronger type stability 
(for those who want it) and even can allow for under-the-hood optimizations.

I really think we took a step back with 0.2. I think a super strict approach is 
really against what PHP is about.
And a configuration option that significantly impacts how the language behaves 
is probably the worst thing we could do. I remember I bumped into something 
like that with Visual Basic and expression short circuiting (yes the first 
version didn’t have that and it became a configuration option). Completely 
horrible and unmaintainable.

We cannot have a configuration option that changes the core language behavior. 
That is a no-no and there’s a good reason why languages stay away from that.

And definitely disappointed that we took a step back after it seemed we could 
finally come to an agreement on this agonizing topic.

Andi
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