I agree, and I don't think this is a bad trend, once upon a time I think static vs. dynamic was a clear distinction, that distinction is being worn down as we learn more about the value and costs of those approaches - and as that happens we're compromising the approaches to gain more of the value.

In PHP the (mostly) JIT interpretation exposed a weakness where infrequently executed pieces of code were harder to have confidence in. Unit tests and such have raised our confidence but explicit typing can also raise our confidence in an easier manner, both are good to have but having access to more tools just makes our lives easier.

In fact PHP can be pre-cached in bytecode now (which is basically just a traditional compiled approach) and in the default run mode PHP code files are interpreted and then cached to minimize the number of times code needs to be interpreted. The lines between compiled vs. interpreted are getting really fuzzy now and were pretty fuzzy as far back as Java bytecode (which is as far as my memory goes, others may have a better handle on earlier experiments in partial compilation)

> I agree, and I don't think this is a bad trend, once upon a time I think static vs. dynamic was a clear distinction

I think there's still a very clear distinction, but there's often value in having access to both in one language. The dynamic typing features can often make up for limitations of your type system, for instance.