[sudomal]

One thing I like a lot about PHP is its version stability, it has changed somewhat over time, but not to the point where it breaks important features.

I have seen many a framework and language (the sort that you might see hyped on this website) that make drastic changes and only their most ardent fans stick with the new version. It's often an opportunity to switch to the next big thing.

[laumars]

I'm not asking for PHP to break it's compatibility over night, but it's fairly reasonable for a language to depreciate a function over several major releases which might span a few years.

ie version 5.6 will raise a warning when some_function is called, saying that some_function will be depreciated in future versions of PHP. So you have both the old and new functions running in parallel for a while. Then a couple of major versions later, you drop support for the older function name.

As I said before, PHP has already been doing just this for some stuff for a while now, so it's not an alien concept to PHP developers.