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Comment by maxxxxx | Hacker News Reader

Agreed. Adding type annotations is already a huge refactor in itself though and pretty risky with PHP. Once you have that done life will be much easier.

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For those unfamiliar with php, or its type annotations, why is adding type annotations a risky step? Do they become enforcing?

    function foo(string $bar) { ... }
    foo(1234) // kaboom?

I think your code will work because 1234 can be converted to a string. I think the trouble starts once you pass around objects.

It actually doesn't according to http://sandbox.onlinephpfunctions.com/code/8804b49c23d620228..., though different PHP versions could produce different results.

This works with PHP 7

<?php //Enter your code here, enjoy!

function foo(string $bar) { return $bar . $bar; }

echo foo(1234);

Yeah pretty much. It's risky because type checking produces fatal errors that aren't always easy to trap properly. You don't realize how much a code base relies on PHPs type coercion until you add annotations and watch it blow up, in often subtle ways.

"Subtle" is the keyword here.

Wait? You mean you get runtime errors? That's well...good in a way but as you say dangerous on old code.

To get the true benefits of typing you should also run a static type analyzer.

Are there any for PHP?

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