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InfoWorld: What would be the advantage of a strictly typed PHP as opposed to it being loosely typed?

Lerdorf: It makes it a lot more rigid, but it also means that people will now have to care about types a lot, which is a huge change for a loosely typed language. And it's not a change that I think would help most people. I talked in the talk about the broadness of PHP, that we scale down and we scale up, and this is something that would maybe help the upper third, but the lower two-thirds are going to go, "Oh, man. What the hell? Why doesn't my code work anymore?" Because now every library I call suddenly says, "No, you passed me a string, I expect an integer." You're passing the onus of doing that to the people who don't necessarily understand the difference between the string and an integer, whereas the guy who wrote the library understands perfectly: "Hey, I know I need an integer. I can check this damn string. If it looks like an integer, great, I'll use it as an integer." That's what a loosely typed language does.

InfoWorld: Would you say PHP is one of the easier languages to program in?

Lerdorf: Yes. I think it is. It's a tricky balance to strike. You don't want to hide the problem too much because people still need to understand the basic structure of the Web. So we've had some other solutions in the past where you draw your application almost. You don't really know how it works. It's tricky to strike this balance between simplifying the problem but not oversimplifying it to the point where people don't understand the nature of an HTTP request and a response, so the basic characteristic of the Web still has to survive. You cannot write an effective application unless you actually understand the request/response nature of a Web request.

InfoWorld: When you developed PHP, did you think it would become as popular as it is?

Lerdorf: No. Not at all. Never. This was a tool for me. This was me building my own hammer because I couldn't find a hammer at the time.

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InfoWorld: Is there anything else that you want to say as far as what a PHP developer should be looking out for?

Lerdorf: They should be upgrading more. We have lots and lots of users on older versions of PHP, which sometimes gets a little frustrating, and people will complain about features and missing features. Then you ask them [and find out] well, they're using PHP 5.1, and this feature they've been bugging me about, well, we introduced that four years ago. But they're not up to that speed yet. They're still on code from eight years ago.

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