It catches so much stuff, I've been using PHP since 2009 and it there was still stuff I was doing day to day it flagged me for, it's not only that it makes you write better code but it catches so much stuff that you no longer have to hold in your head (things like "Method throws an unhandled exception" etc).
In terms of "wow" (impact vs amount of effort required) it's second only to TypeScript in the last year or so for me.
Not a co-incidence that both tools add better type checking (amongst a lot of other useful stuff) to the languages I was stuck using.
Thanks for the recommendation – I've used PHPStorm when doing large refactors, and it's incredible.
Unfortunately, you can't force everyone to use it (especially given its price). That's why a bunch of people have written separate PHP static analysis tools:
It catches so much stuff, I've been using PHP since 2009 and it there was still stuff I was doing day to day it flagged me for, it's not only that it makes you write better code but it catches so much stuff that you no longer have to hold in your head (things like "Method throws an unhandled exception" etc).
In terms of "wow" (impact vs amount of effort required) it's second only to TypeScript in the last year or so for me.
Not a co-incidence that both tools add better type checking (amongst a lot of other useful stuff) to the languages I was stuck using.