Backward compat - something that's been pretty holy in PHP land for ages and hence got abbreviated in the internals community. Pretty fair IMO to abbreviate something that's so core to a language's vision. Don't forget that HN isn't the target audience of this post: it's people who are involved with PHP internals.
Pretty fair IMO to abbreviate something that's so core to a language's vision.
When talking to the faithful, sure. Language communities need to constantly fight against a tendency towards navel-gazing and only wanting to talk to the faithful.
Sure. Maybe I came across harsher than I meant. Please take this in a constructive spirit. I'm a hoary old veteran who has been a part of a non-mainstream dynamic language community which fell under the naval-gazing trap. In the age of the Internet, a language should always be thinking about outreach. It doesn't matter if you have the best technology, or it it's faster and more nimble. The community needs to keep up with the outreach side.
Personally, I have a strong AD bias. Seriously, though, what does this term mean?