Speaking from experience being forced to use php, it's a hassle to have ahead-of-time guarantees on your data that you need to strip out or build back up everytime you interact with the (massive) standard library
They should be a bit more enthused to add that kind of expressiveness to their STL and make it a first class citizen in the STL
Additionally, separating it into two steps allows them to more easily launch this as a preview feature, get feedback, and then commit to a design before trying to overhaul the whole standard library. If they try and do it all at once, that gives them little room to actually iterate on the feature.
It took two major versions to add types to both function arguments and return values and there's still no type-restricted data structures. Think "array of foo".
Just overall, other than with bash, I've never shot myself in the foot more often than with php
I despise that thing with a passion
I don't generally like duck-typing languages, but PHP is no worse than its competitors.
I find the biggest argument for or against PHP in the context of these languages to be "I find dollar signs aestethically (dis)pleasing". It's a perfectly valid preference to have, but people talk about PHP like they're still porting Wordpress plugins to PHP 4.