It didn’t start out as a cleanup. I was trying to fix a bug, just a small one, buried deep in a feature no one wanted to touch. The logic felt like an archaeological dig: layers of patches, old comments from devs long gone, fallbacks on fallbacks. Every fix had another fix duct-taped on top. After a few hours of tracing edge cases and odd branches, I stopped and asked the question I should have asked sooner: ...
You wouldn’t expect a dot-four release to shift how you think. But PHP 8.4 did something subtle, it made domain models feel more honest. I didn’t notice it at first. The headlines were quiet: property hooks, asymmetric visibility, a few nice bugfixes. No splashy new syntax, no game-changing JIT leap. Just a couple of tools that looked like sugar for edge cases. Then I tried refactoring a class that had always annoyed me, a UserProfile, bloated with validations, protected properties, getters, and conditional setters. The usual dance: guard invariants, expose safely, override when needed but not always. You know the type. ...