Samson pointed out this PHP bug report to me:

http://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=50696

It is an entertaining read. This illustrates a couple of problems with PHP that make me wary of using it for anything too serious. They seem to have a flagrant disregard for specification of their API, as well as backward compatibility. Additionally, the lack of strong typing appears to be the source of all of their issues. I’m not going to say weak typing is bad, I just find strong typing forces the programmer to resolve issues at compile time instead of at runtime (i.e. before the end user is actually running the code and the app blows up on them).

All of this culminates into this bug report, which erupts into a flame war, uncovering the underlying big egos that have probably led to the feeling that strict specification is unnecessary and developers can just “deal with” changes in the API in minor releases. Both of the PHP developers involved in the conversation were extremely unprofessional and resorted to such tactics as name dropping to argue their case.

It sucks, because I think PHP would be pretty nice if they were just a little more strict and professional about these things (both the technical and personal issues).