> I hope you realize that "fixing" these types of early mistakes is almost impossible for PHP

I do, yes; which means early mistakes stay in the language forever; same as in javascript. More's the pity.

I think fixing as in "removing and replacing" is indeed impossible, but defining a new convention and making alternative names for the same function would work fine.

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.

I think you actually could fix this forward by using named arguments instead of positional ones?

Notice that lots of (probably most of; maybe even all) examples in the linked talk are due to unreasonable inputs. `true + true` doesn't make sense; `{}.toString().call(new Date())` or `+[] === +![]` don't make much sense either. This is just not what developers do. Meanwhile, iterating over arrays is absolutely what developers do, on an hourly basis. Which is why I said that javascript doesn't have things like that — the papercuts it inflicts on you hour after hour after hour.