You absolutely can use @ in sane codebases. And you give the example yourself: In other languages you often enough see that boilerplate where thrown exception is discarded, because there is no sane reaction to some edge case and you just want the program to continue, because you know it will work anyway. And that's @.

Note though that @ was already neutered in some earlier recent PHP releases.

This.

One common use case for the @ operator, is when "destructuring" array members into variables. In some cases, you can't know if the member will be available, but it's not important if it's missing. In that case, you can silence the warning.

$array = ['apple', 'pear']; @list($mainFruit, $secondaryFruit, $tertiaryFruit);

Since I suppress the warning that would occur due to the third member not being present, the program will continue executing instead of halting.

> The @ operator of php. In languages like Java, to silently catch all exceptions and do nothing with them requires at least some boiler plate.

The @ operator doesn't get rid of exceptions it get rids of "warnings" which are basically built in log messages.

It used to get a bad wrap for also silencing fatal errors, but it stopped doing that a while ago.

The @ operator is something that should only be rarely used, but it is no way comparable to catching exceptions and doing nothing with them. There are sane uses for it.

The claim was "PHP invites bad code" - but your point is for "bad code can be written in PHP" which is really not the same thing. A quick google for the @ brought up https://stackoverflow.com/questions/136899/suppress-error-wi... where the highest voted response is ~"NO, don't use it please". No use case I've come across during the past 10 years has required or even nudged me in the direction of @. It's an ancient relic that the whole community considers a no-no. I'd be curious if you really want to argue that this state of affairs "invites" using the @.