Well, no so weird, I'm not a native english speaker, and I've seen the term hundreds of times over the years...

It's also quite common on HN:

https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Anews.ycombinator.com+...

The order inserted makes most sense in most cases. Hand crafting integer based array indexes out of order is rare. And as you say a simple ksort call guarantees sort order.

    ksort($arr);
    echo join($arr, ", ");
    // one, two, three

You start with an _empty_ array, then (somehow) set the third element of that array? That makes very little sense.

Had you _initialized_ your example as an array with a length of 3, your desired behavior would, indeed, manifest.

Ideally the maintainers of PHP would rename it and deprecate the use of `array()` over a long period of time.

Well, there's no reason a language could not initialize an empty array to some initial capacity, either on declaration or when you add an indexed element.

$arr = []

doesn't appear to be initializing to any capacity. So that after:

$arr[2] = "two"

I would expect:

count($arr) === 1

And honestly, sure. A language could be designed to pad the array with empty values if you specify an index greater than the upper bound (or lesser than the lower bound). I believe a sibling mentioned matlab did something like that.

But is that really better behavior or just different behavior? I don't really see an important difference. My point was that the criticism was fairly weak. PHP, indeed, has a very useful abstraction in its concept of "array". Most of the hate should be directed at the name, not the construct.

    $id = 12835151;
    $arr[$id] = Get_thing_with_id( $id );

Obviously, I'd agree that a map/associative array/dict/etc is a better choice here; I'm just annoyed about the name.