John Lim gives some of his opinions on the Rasmus email, and a few thoughts on the fact that everyone seems so excited about breaking everyone's code to forge ahead (slow adopters be damned!).

Rasmus Lerdorf was brainstorming the other day and suggested some wholesale changes for PHP6. I presume the post was just to test the waters, but I was frightened to see so many of the brilliant programmers (who design and develop PHP internals) were keen on breaking backward compatibility. Fortunately, I found the biggest voice of reason was Zeev Suraski.

Zeev's response is less on the reckless charge to remove things like register_globals and magic_quotes and more on the moderation standpoint, taking things slower, making adjustments less recklessly angle. He remarks that he's concerned with the "wholesale mode" that the internals list has gotten into with this:

the almost unanimous "YES!" response, and the overall feeling that suddenly with 6.0 breakage comes without a price.