Finding the argument order for a method takes ~3-5 seconds. Its irrelevant. array() vs [] is actually a bigger deal as its indicative of php's verbose syntax. But its not a killer.

People like JS because it got the fundamentals right. The bad parts are just details. PHP is bad because it got the fundamentals wrong. But people still harp on the details.

When I work with an unfamiliar class in Ruby, or come back to something familiar (say, Array) after a long time away, I'll often not "know" the exact method signatures for what I want, but I'll just guess something reasonable based on my knowledge of the language and idioms. And, lo and behold, most often it works!

Having to "remember" (does this method use array_?) or "translate" is a mental tax; there's cycles wasted that could keep your mind in the business logic.

  > When people want to pick nits about this or significant whitespace 
  > it makes me think that there must very little variance between 
  > the languages if THIS is the issue that deserves scrutiny.

However this "short array syntax" is representative of PHP's sluggish internal development process. [] is very nearly the de-facto solution for creating arrays, and yet the PHP core devs have, for two years, rejected[1] patches that implement it on ridiculous grounds.

[1]: https://wiki.php.net/rfc/shortsyntaxforarrays