PHP and JavaScript are dynamic. Here you'll be able to pass distances as feet or meters, but if you try to pass in pounds you'll get a compile time error -- can't do that in dynamic languages :)
So, when I said JavaScript, I really meant TypeScript, and I found its gradual/structural typing system to be the most ergonomic type system I've ever used (if you want nominal types, it's pretty trivial to get there just by adding a compile-time-only tag, like `{ typeName?: "FooType" }`).
In this case, the TypeScript approach might be something like
You can get as specific as you want, without having to wrap/unwrap anything, or even define a new named type. [1]
I think I like Scala conceptually--when people talk about it I think "yeah, good idea!"--but every time I've looked at Scala code it struck me as having an excessive amount of boilerplate to wrap/unwrap stuff just to make the type checker happy.
The other bad-tasting thing about Scala is that I wrote a program[2] in it many years ago and then later came back to try to fix some bugs and the language had changed so much that I had to find some old version of it + an old JVM and Dockerize it. Docker's a godsend for this sort of thing, but kind of inconvenient for development.
In this case, the TypeScript approach might be something like
You can get as specific as you want, without having to wrap/unwrap anything, or even define a new named type. [1]I think I like Scala conceptually--when people talk about it I think "yeah, good idea!"--but every time I've looked at Scala code it struck me as having an excessive amount of boilerplate to wrap/unwrap stuff just to make the type checker happy.
The other bad-tasting thing about Scala is that I wrote a program[2] in it many years ago and then later came back to try to fix some bugs and the language had changed so much that I had to find some old version of it + an old JVM and Dockerize it. Docker's a godsend for this sort of thing, but kind of inconvenient for development.
[1] My notes about this approach in TypeScript: https://www.nuke24.net/plog/32.html
[2] https://github.com/TOGoS/PicGrid