Old versus new PHP

PHP has likely helped you become a much more rigorous developer over the years. If during its first decades of existence, PHP allowed you to write code the way you wanted to and without restricting you from doing so, with the (very) few advantages that this brings, in hindsight, it was mostly the opportunity to have as many ways to write code as there are developers (which rarely lead to exceptional results) that made it popular. As we now know, that can be a source of endless and infernal bugs to debug. Fortunately, the evolution of the language in the last few years has fixed a lot of these bugs, to the benefit of our applications.

Strict typing

First, let’s look at one of the most important things you should be using in the newest versions of PHP from version 7.4 – the strict typing of properties.

There was a time you were allowed to pass any data to any variable and cast variables as much as you wish, without a real and native way to prevent...