I like this library and promote that wherever I can, but the safe library was even mentioned in the post:
> I love the smell of false in the morning, but despite that I do wish that all PHP’s built-in functions threw exceptions. We have the famous safe library which does just that! But if you’re like me then you don’t like coupling huge amounts of code in perpetuity to an external library.
I just wrap the ones I actually need that for and put them in traits (sometimes multiple related per trait). So it's internal, small footprint, and really needs 0 maintenance. This is also good for e.g. json_* when you want to provide app-wide defaults.
Ah, I'd completely missed that. As for depending on an external library ... get used to it. Writing PHP without any external deps is strictly for one-off scripts -- and rarely even then.
I work on the same team as the author. I appreciate PHP in general, particularly because it contributes significantly to covering expenses (earning a six-figure income in Europe). While there is undoubtedly room for improvement in the language, this post highlights some valid points that we encounter in our day-to-day work on the 'large E-Commerce project' briefly mentioned at the beginning.
I hope that discussions like these raise awareness within the PHP community and eventually lead to solutions. Considering the impressive initiatives the PHP foundation has recently undertaken, I am confident that the language is evolving in the right direction.
Certainly, there are still individuals in the PHP world who may not grasp the essence of this post. In some tech interviews, I've encountered people stating that they 'don't know PHP, only Laravel.' I don't oppose Laravel (or WordPress or any other framework); I just want to emphasize that some individuals may not appreciate the underlying technology. Reflecting on my early days of programming, there was a tendency to exclusively focus on learning jQuery, neglecting the importance of understanding JavaScript.
I also switched to a Nokia 230 ~2 years ago, first just as an experiment, haven't gone back so far.
I tried a KaiOS based phone also in that time, but that was so unbelievably unstable that I ditched it after using it for two weeks or so.
I still have a smartphone powered off in a drawer, that I pick whenever I need that (~once a month, for banking stuff, using Google Maps to drive to another city, etc). I have Telegram running on my laptop and a few other things like the app for my mowing robot.
In general, also at work, I like to mute all notifications if I need to focus, heavy Pomodoro user, too.
There are not that many downsides for me. Sometimes someone asks me to send a phone number to them, which is only possible via Bluetooth. So I need to write the number down on a piece of paper, type it back into an SMS and send it. What a waste of time - I first thought. But in reality, that dump phone saves much more time, than these little pieces of manual effort cause, so in the end, I still have more free time. I was surprised at how often I do things that I don't need to do that often, e.g. checking my bank account balance.
OT: We used MS Teams and Slack and management recently decided to close our Slack workspace and switch to MS Teams. Most of our devs are unhappy with Teams so we switched to a selfhosted zulip instance and we're very happy with that.
I was using Google Play Music only for my own music and moved recently to Google Drive which just syncs my audio folder on every device. I use https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.cloudbeats on my android phone and Rhythmbox (since I just sync plain mp3-files) on my notebook.
> [...] only to realise there the class has a private constructor or that there are static constructors which I should be using [...]