Over the years, we have refactored our PHP code base to something which is much more bug proof, and a lot of it is because we demand certain types to be passed to types. Currently we use doc types (for which the IDE helps us heaps) and type hinting for objects being passed as arguments.
For a given process (e.g. form submission) there will nevertheless be an entry point where strings from the web are passed in. But if you can minimize that area as much as possible, beyond that one place (a function or class) which understands the mapping from incoming string types to PHP types, you end up with a code base which behaves mostly like a statically type language.
This has reduced a huge subset of bugs which are caused by unexpected input being passed to a function. Having the language itself tell you when you made an error statically while writing is much better than having to wait until runtime.
A similar argument would stand for why we moved from dynamically created strings sent to the database, towards a database abstraction layer where we pick up syntax errors at time of writing.
Over the years, we have refactored our PHP code base to something which is much more bug proof, and a lot of it is because we demand certain types to be passed to types. Currently we use doc types (for which the IDE helps us heaps) and type hinting for objects being passed as arguments.
For a given process (e.g. form submission) there will nevertheless be an entry point where strings from the web are passed in. But if you can minimize that area as much as possible, beyond that one place (a function or class) which understands the mapping from incoming string types to PHP types, you end up with a code base which behaves mostly like a statically type language.
This has reduced a huge subset of bugs which are caused by unexpected input being passed to a function. Having the language itself tell you when you made an error statically while writing is much better than having to wait until runtime.
A similar argument would stand for why we moved from dynamically created strings sent to the database, towards a database abstraction layer where we pick up syntax errors at time of writing.