Apropos PHP: I hate it with such as much passion as the next guy, but I am quite impressed with what Facebook managed to do with Hack! (Including adding lots of types.)
Don't forget, much of that effort has now trickled down into the PHP language itself. We've long had scalar types for function parameters and return values, but with 7.4 and 8.0 we've added union types[1], nullable types[2], and typed properties[3]. While not a part of the language yet, generics can be annotated with the linting tools PHPStan and Psalm[4], and native support for these annotations is coming to the next release of PhpStorm[5].
Using PhpStorm, I've worked with 100 kloc PHP codebases where almost every type was inspectable. And the language support and tooling are only getting better all the time.
Coming from Haskell and Scheme, I'm now waiting for them to unify the syntactic handling of variables.
At the moment, you have to put a $ in front of most variables, and no adornment for when you want to call something as a function. Reminds me of Common Lisp with its two name spaces for functions and other variables.
Yeah, the $ sigil for variables is a historical curiosity, but I don’t think it’s going anywhere. It would be an unacceptable BC break for codebases that have implicitly relied on this “two namespaces” behavior
