Why I Still Love Backwards Compatibility

I've written about backwards compatibility before. Well, it has reared its ugly head again as it always does anytime I have to do anything serious with Linux. Don't get me wrong, I love Linux, in fact I'm writing this blog post on Linux.

The amount of time that I spend fighting to do small things that turn into big headaches due to lack of backwards compatibility is amazing at times.

My project at work right now is to put together some SOAP services using PHP. Only problem is, our server runs PHP4, and mature SOAP support only exists in PHP5. Of course, PHP5 breaks enough backwards compatibility with our existing code that migrating from PHP4 to 5 isn't an option right now. Sure, PHP4 has PEAR::SOAP, which seems very nice at first, but once I start doing anything complicated with it, it becomes clear that it requires a bit of polishing yet.

Where is Open Source's Raymond Chen?