Question

I always see people in serious projects use :: everywhere, and -> only occasionally in local environment.

I only use -> myself and never end up in situations when I need a static value outside of a class. Am I a bad person?

As I understand, the only situation when -> won’t work is when I try following:

class StaticDemo {  
    private static $static  
}

$staticDemo = new StaticDemo( );

$staticDemo->static; // wrong  
$staticDemo::static; // right

But am I missing out on some programming correctness when I don’t call simple public methods by :: ?

Or is it just so that I can call a method without creating an instance?

Answer 1

:: is for referencing static properties or methods of a class. -> is for referencing instance properties and methods. You aren’t missing out on any programming correctness, and if you are a bad person then it isn’t because of this. Which one you use depends on the purpose of your class and how its written. But also, PHP didn’t have namespaces until very recently so many people encapsulated their code in static classes to emulate namespaces to avoid naming collisions. It is possible you are seeing code that does that.