It depends, if a customer says his/her server runs on PHP 4 or even PHP 5.0-5.2, I will tell him/her to upgrade the server, or to switch to a better webhost. Because its not worth compensating for those minority of customers who do not contribute much to your revenues/profits or popularity anyway. Just like when you charge a price for your product, there will be customers coming to you saying ‘I want to buy your application, but my pocket only has this little amount of money’. Do you care about this complaint? Maybe, if your price really is too high and is driving too many customers away. But no matter how low you set your price, there will always be potential customers unable or unwilling to pay as much, then they just have to walk away and chill.
That’s the law of nature, you do not compromise for the absolute minorities. Of course, my software will continue to support PHP 5.3 for a while, thats only because PHP 5.3 is still the predominant version of PHP installed on webhosts. Once most webhosts move to PHP 5.4, support for PHP 5.3 will be dropped too. As far as I know, CakePHP 3 even already drops support for PHP 5.3 and requires PHP 5.4. Each developer/framework may have different opinions on whats the minimum PHP version to support/maintain, but there’s always a minimum. You cannot support all versions anyway, do you even remember how PHP 2 or PHP 3 looks like? Nope, you wont, and you will tell me that essentially nobody is using PHP 2/3 nowadays. Okay, I can say the same for PHP 4, or moreover, anything below 5.3.
Yeah you understand this, and we can apply the same logic to the PHP internals. You are entitled to have your opinions, and similarly PHP internals are allowed to have theirs. Because your opinion is minor and opposite to what the majority of PHP community is looking for, the PHP internals will not worry about your protest against the removal of PHP 4 constructors and any other backward incompatible changes.
Honestly, what surprises me the most is that you actually make a big deal out of this PHP 4 constructor removal issue. Just as the poster before my current post said, almost nobody seriously cares about this. I wont advocate for PHP 4 constructors removal either, but unlike you worrying about backward incompatibility, my reason is that I dont care. In fact, before you brought up the PHP 4 constructor thing I almost forgot that one can actually write constructors in a different way in PHP. Ah these old days, but seriously whether or not PHP 4 constructor is removed or retained, it will make little to no difference for most of the PHP developers. So just relax and chill okay? Its not really worth arguing at, for some things that pretty much no one truly cares.