> "no good reason" is entirely subjective, though. If your purpose is to make the language simpler to newcomers, implicit conversions everywhere are a great way to get things done. And the popularity of PHP (especially for new-to-programming people) heavily supports that they made the correct decision to work well for that market.
You are right, in a way. Sure, it may attract and retain more newcomers, but that's like saying that tobacco is "teenager friendly". I think it's not beginner friendly at all if you must have years of experience to avoid the innumerable pitfalls which PHP lays for you all over the place, learning, e.g. the range of Integers in PHP, which defines when a string will be either a float or an int, or that you should actually use strcmp.
In Python, Ruby, or heck, Haskell, you'd just have to do == and there would be no surprises.
I agree entirely, but we're thinking like programmers. Grab someone who's never programmed at all and ask them if `123 is equal to "123"`.
This essentially breaks down to the top-down vs bottom-up education style debate. You can learn the gritty details and get caught up in minor details that may not matter in other languages, or learn how to do something, and get tripped up by the details in other languages. Similarly, we could teach kids abstract algebra, or basic +-*/ and then over-simplify when they try to divide by zero.
Neither is ideal, both have useful traits and problems, so we have to pick one. Or try to come up with something radically different.
edit: to ask it another way: if PHP is a massively-popular gateway drug to the world of programming, but it gives some people horrible flashbacks for the rest of their lives, do you want to make it illegal and close the door to a huge number of people?
You are right, in a way. Sure, it may attract and retain more newcomers, but that's like saying that tobacco is "teenager friendly". I think it's not beginner friendly at all if you must have years of experience to avoid the innumerable pitfalls which PHP lays for you all over the place, learning, e.g. the range of Integers in PHP, which defines when a string will be either a float or an int, or that you should actually use strcmp.
In Python, Ruby, or heck, Haskell, you'd just have to do == and there would be no surprises.