[delayed]

After over two decades of working in PHP, I'm now working in Java. PHP is basically Java-lite. I am absolutely loving the compile-time safety of Java, but I dearly miss PHP's maps and arrays. In Java, the amount of verbosity for defining a map/list and operating on it is overwhelming.

Modern PHP is great. Many powerful language features, excellent performance, great community and package ecosystem, and decent enough safety with modern static analysis tools.

I'm not too sure I agree with the author's complaints here. When using something like array_filter, you're typically mapping from collection to collection (i.e. you don't care about the first element--you care about the whole thing) and so this problem is really a non-issue. The next follow up step would usually be foreach, or another operation like array_map, in which case it's a non-issue.

If you really do need the first element, you can use array_first. And if you really do need a fixed-sized collection, you can use SplFixedArray.

The point on properties is valid to an extent, but IMO not really an issue you commonly run into in the real world (regardless of language, your constructors should generally return an object in a usable state).

PHP has quite a lot of oddities such as how loose comparisons (`==`) are made, numeric-strings, and type coercion. But the two oddities mentioned in the article are not that "odd" with a bit of context.

- PHP has `SplFixedArray`[^1] that work similar to the standard arrays you expect from other languages. SPL extension is always available in PHP 5.3+, it is not even possible to compile PHP without it anymore. There is no specific type for list-arrays and associative arrays, but there is an `array_is_list` function to quickly check it.

- For typed properties, if a property is not typed, it is effectively considered `mixed $var = null`. If the property is typed, and has no default value, then it is considered uninitialized, and not allowed to access.

[^1]: https://www.php.net/manual/en/class.splfixedarray.php

I’d love to see a post like this for JS that actually talks about things people run into. Usually when people make a post like this in js, its about archaic things nobody actually uses.

To note, it is surprisingly refreshing to completely forgo instanciable classes on a modern codebase.

Phpstan deals well with type definitions, arrays are powerful enough to contain whatever needed, and functions can be stored and passed around easily enough.

if("0") {} being equivalent to if(false) {} still gives me nightmares even though I've stopped using PHP for at least 6 years now :)

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All of PHP is an oddity. It is a practical oddity, but also ugly to no ends. I am glad to have abandoned it many years ago.

Surprisingly enough, I was more productive in PHP than I was in perl. Perhaps perl is even stranger than PHP.

> This example exposes the "uninitialized" state that a property can be in, which is NOT the same as NULL. This distinction frustratingly comes up when you try to do a null check on these properties:

If you're accessing an uninitialized property or checking if a property is uninitialized, you're probably already doing something wrong.

The point of class properties with no default value is that you're supposed to set them either in the constructor, immediately after creating an instance, or via some other method that guarantees they'll have a value by the time you need to read them (such as deserialization with validation).

If you want your properties to have a default "unset" value that you can trivially check for, that's what null is for. The author doesn't make it clear whether they are aware that you can declare a nullable string and give it the default value of null, but I hope they are.

Every time I work in another language I miss PHP’s arrays.

I think the “bad rep” is coming from developers that stopped developing themselves.