This is really making what used to be an easy to read, easy to learn language a lot less of that. Some of us still don’t use IDEs and are okay with more thoroughly defined code that is readable.

If people are so gung ho on adding in syntax hacks, shortcuts, etc, they seem to be bringing ideas from other languages and why not simply continue to use that other language? PHP seems to be looking more and more like Go or JS to me now. Anyone want to start a fork called “PHP Classic”? :)