Kris Craig I usually just read the list, sometimes add if I have something to say and I had voiced my opinion on typehinting before. And you know, just from the stand of a userland developer who has 7-8 years of experience and devoting myself to the excelence at PHP, i see this discussion about adding strict typehinting to PHP as ridicilous. I cannot express my thrustration, because i would probably be kicked out of the list permanently. The problem is that those, who are actually advocating for this, come from all sorts of languages (or have moved to them some time ago) and now what to "make php better". Sorry folks, but I have picked up a script language not because it has strict type hinting, but actually because it does not have it. And because in web we are working with text. Almost any data we get is text and in critical places we just check that data we have is actually a number and not a random string. Or is an object of certain type. Or is an array. Or a valid string. And we let the PHP to handle routine conversions. And it's good because there can be tons of them per single script call. String to number and vice-verse conversions are all over the place in almost any script. They are so common, that if you would add strict typehinting - you would probably need a type conversion on every function/method call.
PHP had (and i have to believe it still has, but people started to really forget it) a principle called KISS. And strict typehinting is NOT simple. It really complicates things, a lot. And really, in a scripting language?! Are people going nuts because of 2012? Has to be, because i just can't explain what is happening with the typehinting rfc discussions for the last year. The way i see it, there is two types of people. The PHP crowd, that says that optional weak type hinting could be helpfull and strict-type hinting crowd witch has come to PHP from different languages or had moved from PHP to them, but ocasionaly returns to it. What i thing is that core devs should really look at what the php is, on what principles it is built and based. Remember what it was built for and why it's popular. And that if you handle it correctly - it's a powerful tool, and works great. And that we do not need other python, perl or ruby. PHP always had it's own way and it should. My vote is for optional weak typehinting that will do what the most want - to write a more solid library code with less annoing checks and does not put additional restraints on the userland code. Because if you give people something like strict typing - it just will get abused to such extreme by some people, that it will create more negative than good in the long run. PHP is not the easiest language out there. Yes, it's easy to start with, but it's not that easy to master and strike the right balance between simplicity and complexity. And people tend to go overcomplex forgetting the KISS. I'd rather see the PDO getting a major kick, or dumped allready and work gone into db drivers and unicode support improvement - these are far more important than strict type hinting.
