I waffle so hard here: on the one hand, php’s “juggling” does make for faster implementation, and is super convenient. The part where it fails is during that juggle it can have super weird behavior, especially in coercing strings to numeric values.

I’ve started going the route of explicit types in all new functionality and having tests cover the awry situations that can occur, mainly because it can help prevent those “odd” situations by throwing up a big red flag rather than just “oh, I think I’ve got what you want here.”