Union Types have been accepted for PHP 8

When I started programming a few years back, I was told that PHP is legacy tech and a terrible language I should avoid like a plague. After years of battling with Node.js on the backend, I took a closer look at modern PHP and the Laravel framework and I was amazed by how good the developer experience was. The language itself feels like a lite version of Java. I believe everyone starting on web development should know PHP. It's hugely deployed, it has a very mature and rich ecosystem and it's a great language to build your side project/business without spending your time on meaningless tasks. Don't be driven by FOMO like I was, there's no such thing as a "perfect programming language". Every language has it's quirks and that's fine. PHP might be old and boring but it helps you get things done faster than using the new coolest language.

Whether you love it or hate it, it's cool that the PHP project has come so far. I know a lot of people still use PHP every day, so it's good to see the language continues to improve. I imagine a significant percentage of web services are still PHP based to this day.

It's nice to start out typeless during problem domain discovery and proof of concept phase then quickly introduce types when you better understand the problem. This change will help that phase transition with enforcement right in the runtime as opposed to simple doc block annotations.

I wonder how stock PHP is stacking up to Hack both from the dimensions of efficiency, safety, and productivity these days.

This is one bad feature among many good decisions, but bad nonetheless. The language will have yet-another-way to do type-erasure&#x2F;autoboxing that will have to be tracked down, in the interest of removing boilerplate when multiple types are desired to be coerced. Type safety is recognized as valuable by the PHP core voters on one hand, and waved away by the other.<p>Imagine the fun!<p>&lt;?php<p>function callit(float $numI) {<p><pre><code> $numB = $numI || ($numI&#x2F;2); echo gettype($numB).&quot;\n&quot;; $numF = ($numI&#x2F;2); echo gettype($numF).&quot;\n&quot;; return some($numB); </code></pre> }<p>function someType(int|float $numX):int {<p><pre><code> echo gettype($numX).&quot;\n&quot;; return $numX; </code></pre> }<p>$ret = callit(2);<p>echo gettype($ret).&quot;\n&quot;;

This is cool! I wish tools like postgres had them too.

It was long ago I worked with PHP, before PHP 5. Is typing enforced with PHP these days? Or is it more like type hints, as in Python?

Now please do this for Golang :)

Before the usual avalanche of posts criticising some PHP 4 features, the union types look like a nice way to formalise something that is commonly used and very useful.