This is very much what Lua has done. Major version switches not only don't retain backwards compatibility, but have in the past drastically changed the languag

This is very much what Lua has done. Major version switches not only don't retain backwards compatibility, but have in the past drastically changed the language. With v5.0 they finally seemed to hit on a good combination of features, syntax, and semantics, and the pace of new major releases has slowed noticeably.