To the function oriented PHP style of coding
i.e. is_empty($text)
I prefer the object oriented syntax of c#:
i.e. string.IsNullOrEmpty(text)
Is there a way to try to shorten the distance between c# and PHP?
PHP had functional paradigma for long time, so there are plenty of things, which are solved in this way. Also PHP add types in last year, so there are still long way to improve some things.
But there are already some tools. You can use https://github.com/nette/utils which contains already some usefull OOP classes and more intuitive methods.