> It is powerful indeed. But PHP syntax feels unelegant and making me write unnecessary ceremony. It feels different when I write typescript code, every character I type fits like lego.
> Especially when my codebase grows so much. Navigating PHP project is like thrown in forest without a map, you can always look up the sun to find your way.
“Elegance” is something that gives people warm fuzzies, I think this is why there are so many Rust advocates (I am one), when pieces fit together nice or can be refactored cleanly and tests are first-party it is nice.
However there have always been “hacky” and “proper” languages, because doing something hacky that works also feels great.
Python is a hacky language, it’s easy to go to 0-100 very quickly. C++ however requires time and precision to make things proper, so people avoid it and few things are made comparatively in C++ unless it's infrastructure software that people spent a lot of time writing.
Maintainability be damned, sometimes you really just need to throw something together.
The curse of things that work is that they will be expanded upon and kept around for too long.
Unfortunately: PHP works, and is an excellent hack-language for the web. Which means there’s a lot of code that becomes “production grade” that should really have never been intended to live forever in the first place.