Michael Kimsal has posted some more thoughts on what he calls the "sad state of PHP development" pointing out some of the practices of the PHP group surrounding the development of the language.

Every few months there's a release, whether large or small, which introduces new features and bug fixes. However, with every release also comes fears of tiny, sometimes undocumented, changes that break existing code, and often for no solid reason other than someone with commit access decided they liked the 'new' way better than the old way.

He points out a specific example, get_object_vars and how its return values were changed in an earlier release as well as the update to glob made recently to change its return types.

In his opinion:

No changes should be made to the PHP core without an issue being opened, either in the 'bug' tracker or some other issues tracker.

Be sure to check out the comments for other great opinions on the topic.