It’s funny because when I think of “fractal of bad design”, Javascript is the first thing that comes to mind. I love Javascript but it makes me ask “why?” a lot.
PHP can make absolute garbage, and it can make a elegant product. Just like Javascript can. And same with Python and Ruby and what ever else everyone recommends.
It may be a lot harder to make garbage in Rust, but it's possible. PHP has a problem where it gets out of your way, gives you the entire toolbox to build a house. But the problem is which one of the 17 types of hammers do I use to hammer in one of the 104 different types of nails. Where as Ruby, gives you 3 hammers and 4 different nails, and 7 magic nails that appear after you're done hammering.
I do, yes; which means early mistakes stay in the language forever; same as in javascript. More's the pity.
Let's say the new convention is that functions are named str_*(), then keep strpos(), but create a new one called str_pos() that is the same, and mark the old one as deprecated (but don't remove it).
I am sure there are edge cases where both str_* and str* exist already and do different things, but we can figure something out.