What are the benefits (and drawbacks) of a weakly typed language?

Question

I\'m a big fan of PHP and it\'s obviously a very weakly-typed language. I realize some of the benefits include the general independence of changing variable types on the fly

Answer 1

You have to understand that PHP was created for the context of web applications. Everything in the context of the web is a string. Therefore it is very rare where strong typing would be beneficial.