I'll bite. PHP's automatic type conversion is a severe flaw. The intent was to make it easier for beginners to pick up the language without worrying about tech

I'll bite. PHP's automatic type conversion is a severe flaw. The intent was to make it easier for beginners to pick up the language without worrying about technical details like types, but it violates the "fail fast" principle. It might make it easier for beginners to write code that works some of the time, but at a cost of making it harder to write code that doesn't break in surprising ways later. It's not just that automatic coercion exists, but that the behavior is biased toward returning values that don't produce errors. Treating the string "three" as equal to the number 0 is very unlikely to be the desired behavior. Even if not emitting an error is desired, a contagious NaN value would make a lot more sense. There are certainly ways for an experienced user to mitigate the problem, but beginners don't know them, using them effectively requires discipline and a great deal of production code doesn't use them. The latter problem is cultural, but the language being tolerant of sloppy code naturally attracts people who write sloppy code to the language.