At what point do we stop blaming the developers for not knowing how to
use our badly designed features, and accept responsibility for exposing
an API that is hostile towards simple, efficient, and correct implementations?
Actually that thread seems to strongly argue that either an Exception or fatal error should be thrown. I'm not seeing anyone in that thread wanting to silently truck along -- am I missing it?
EDIT: because of HN's annoying "you are posting too fast" limit I cannot reply to the comment below.
The arguments against Exceptions began in the comments on the relevant pull request: https://github.com/php/php-src/pull/1397