For sure. But let's be clear- I'm not "demanding" anything. I don't want PHP to change, I don't want to use PHP at all. I don't like dynamic languages.
BUT. Today's "best practices" for PHP are to use typehints everywhere. And there are language changes in the works to add MORE typing to PHP.
> I don't want to use PHP at all. I don't like dynamic languages.
Okay, so don't? I think individual languages are better when they don't add every feature under the sun that happens to be popular in the moment. PHP doesn't need threads and it sure as hell doesn't need async. PHP multiprocessing works the old way just fine (fork).
> Today's "best practices" for PHP are to use typehints everywhere.
Yeah, and it's a result of people constantly bitching about PHP lacking features. It's really annoying because it gives credence to complaints like this, I really wish they would have just replied to the strict-types demands with "No, fuck off, this is a dynamic language."
If you must use PHP, I would strongly suggest you use it the way it was intended and stop trying to shoehorn other language features and paradigms into it, you will be much happier. If we simply treat PHP as a dynamically typed C, everything is so much easier.
The problem isn't about a preference between dynamic types and static types. I do think the tacked-on type system of PHP is pretty poor. But even without the mediocre type system, PHP still sucks. You want dynamic? Do Clojure, Lisp, Python (eh), Elixir. PHP and its broken foreach loops and lack of concurrency need not apply (and who in the world believes that forking a process is a good enough for EITHER concurrency OR parallelism for a backend programming language in this day and age?).
BUT. Today's "best practices" for PHP are to use typehints everywhere. And there are language changes in the works to add MORE typing to PHP.