Backwards compatibility is pretty much a requirement for a widely supported language, otherwise you impose a huge amount of pain on your user base and may kill

Backwards compatibility is pretty much a requirement for a widely supported language, otherwise you impose a huge amount of pain on your user base and may kill he language in the long run. Java and Python have pretty much tried to maintain backwards compatibility, Python 3 notwithstanding. OTOH not moving forward in language design also means a slow death as your users move on to more capable languages/frameworks. As the article says, the future of PHP is probably neoPHP, a fork that cleans it all up. Java is another language that needs to break with the past and may ave already done so in the form of Groovy, Scala, and the other JVM based languages. I think the constant churn in Java frameworks is an indication that something is wrong. PHP, at least, has managed to evolve.