Doing Affects Thinking

I ultimately decided not to use Psalm. Of the hundreds of errors I fixed when trying it, in a corpus of 1500+, only a handful would have had operational impact.

But ever since, I've been quietly noticing "Psalm errors," where the phpdoc doesn't match types in practice, or doesn't match the actual type declarations on the method.

(Of course, my API design has been strongly affected by PHP type declaration syntax; I am now trying to design "less convenient" interfaces that offer stronger type information for the IDE. I can't declare string|array|false in PHP, but I can declare ?array for an array or null. This just happens to align with reducing the amount of options Psalm has to deal with.)

Added 2022-01-26: This is not true anymore; PHP 8.0 introduced unions in type declarations. However, if a function returns string|array|false, but exactly which one depends on one of the arguments, Psalm still wants the caller to handle every possibility. I still find it more ergonomic to try to limit the interface to ?array and keep things simple. The other false aspect is that I decided to use Psalm where I get the most value from it. It is in use with some core API code, and all new sub-projects I have started. It's so much easier to keep everything clean from the start, than it is to clean up later.

Containers are Interop

I mean this in the same sense as “XML was created to solve the interoperability problem.”

The container craze is about the interoperability problem across environments. By vendoring the entire distribution and communicating only over the network, they essentially provide isolation for all the dependencies of a service. Maybe that part is the same, in essence, as the nix package manager.

But then containers have one more trick: they run anywhere with a “Linux syscall interface” underneath. Any environment with Docker support can run Docker containers, anywhere. (As long as the binaries run on the host, at least.) It’s not entirely simple—orchestration is an issue, and Docker is working on that, too—but the containers themselves become highly portable, since they’re shipped as black boxes. They don’t depend on code outside themselves, and as such, that outside code cannot break them so easily.

And maybe, by so fully entwining a Linux distro to our app, we’re forgetting how to be cross-distro or cross-platform. And the old coder in me wants to grump about that. Yet, that’s also a kind of freedom. Not everyone has to learn how to write cross-platform code if the container environment defines exactly one platform to run on.

Maybe we’re losing something, but we’re also gaining ease-of-use and accessibility in the deal.