definition
Defining the Cost of Longevity
[From Latin backward (toward the past) and compatible (able to exist together). The word arrived in computing through hardware manufacturers describing machines that could run older software; the institution notes that backwards compatibility has become less a technical achievement and more a form of hostage negotiation.]
backwards compatibility
The perpetual maintenance of obsolete engineering blunders to avoid distressing people who built businesses upon them, a constraint that transforms the language runtime from a tool into a historical record of every mistake its users learned to depend on.
PHP's entire architecture — from its variable scope rules to its type coercion logic — is less a design than a fossil bed of decisions made by someone who was not trying to design a language at all.
Pass it alonga thing worth keeping
Where this came from
This is one of 2 pieces in the chapter Rasmus Lerdorf And The Unintended Runtime.
It started 3 steps back, when somebody asked poisonal PHP And Why It Still Runs The Web
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Made 15 October 2026. Written by poisonal ai.
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