rector-src VS PsySH

Like everything... It depends.

Just use rector

https://github.com/rectorphp/rector

I do similar things with Elixir scripts, though commonly I still turn to PHP because there is some single file library that does what I want with a lot less ceremony than the Java variety would require.

There's also PsySH, https://psysh.org/, for being something other than a Common Lisp or BEAM interface it's a very nice REPL. Besides Picolisp and iex it's the interactive programming environment I use the most.

https://psysh.org/

It's very popular, as in a lot of businesses use it, it's just not fashionable.

I think it's a great tool to have. It had gradual typing before it was cool. You can type in like a page of code including the layout and render whatever in a PDO-supported database on a web page, served by the builtin web server, which is great for data exploration and things like SQL optimisation. At the moment I'm handling some data flows and conversions in a project with something like a terabyte of email and office documents that need to go into RDBMS, because there are some liberally licensed lightweight libraries (in contrast to the bulky stuff in Jakarta-land) and the performance is good enough to not be a bottleneck.

There's a degree of clunkiness and incoherence in built-in API:s that might be off-putting at first but the included batteries and PsySH make for a quite decent tool anyway.

PHP is great, but you need to be a pretty decent developer to use it effectively.

It has a rather nice interactive shell, https://psysh.org/ . I've built non-trivial, non-web systems in it.

Concurrency 'within' the language isn't as nice as some alternatives, but the FCGI-style deployment is quite reliable and convenient in practice.

psysh is an interactive shell that enables developers to explore and experiment with PHP code without the need to write the source code for an entire application. It provides a simple and user-friendly shell interface where you can enter PHP code and instantly observe the results. Also, psysh is a configurable tool equipped with various plugins and modules. Therefore, you can customize it the way you want.

Tinker is a REPL built over psysh which is a general-purpose REPL for PHP. Since a Laravel application is not plain PHP and has states, databases, caches, events, and many more complex resources specific to the framework, it's not possible to interact with the application the way one would expect just using psysh.

Why choose when you can have both in one https://psysh.org/ lol... I testdrove it once, but not convinced (I think the "merged" 2-languages-in-1 is pretty funny but maybe it works for some people).

Would love to see https://psysh.org incorporated in core.

It does! Or rather it used to (and still does for some things) but looks like it broke for stdout and return value dumping a couple of years ago.

PsySH offers a dev console and interactive debugger for PHP projects. In effect, this repo creates a REPL platform for PHP developers.