Hello, as many later posters in the thread have said - a lot of notices, especially uninitialised variables, are classic technical debt.
For example, I just recently fixed a bug, that did this: `$array['key'] += $cost` - the array key was not initialised. Well, turned out that in this case instead of null, it actually grabbed some garbage number out of memory and screwed up the calculations where the total was off by a few hundred euro. Previous dev did care about notices and/or warnings and god knows how long that issue was in production and how many calculations it affected before it was caught. There is also another side effect on performance. error handling in PHP is not free - it does take some significant amount of time. And the more warnings/notices like that you have, the bigger the impact. I have migrated an old code base that was riddled with notices - just fixing those improved performance by 100% without adjusting anything else. Single page load generated 3.5MB of notices and warnings. It also fixed quite a few bugs just because vars got their proper initial values. >From time to time I get reminded when I go back into the crappy code how unpredictable it can be. And the point about PHP 's future. Planning should be done for at least the next 10 years and in today's environment, PHP needs a stricter mode that is just across the board. A project that I start today is by default in strict types mode, PHPStorm has 99.9% of inspections enabled, code analysers are configured and you will not be able to leave a potentially undefined variable in my codebase. git commit hook will just reject it. Frankly, today I do not care what PHP was 5 years ago and how people used it. I care what PHP is today and will be in 5 years when my app goes into production and is actively developed. I also dedicate resources in my budget to keep our software up to date and perform TLC on it. I just do not allow the business to ignore it. A lot of that TLC is done by just regular development workflow - you see crap, you take 5 minutes to fix it. A lot of the time executives don't even know we did the TLC, nor they even should - that's part of our daily responsibilities.
