It sounds like you've never properly programmed in php a day in your life. Stop spouting nonsense. If you're going to develop in php, you do so in strict mode with all errors turned on. Doing otherwise makes you part of the problem.
http://php.net/manual/en/security.globals.php
5.3.0 is 2 and a half years old.
"Now just marginally less braindead than every other language" isn't exactly a selling point.
Sure, it used to be worse, but I see zero commitment from PHP to actually make real steps to fixing the situation. A real first step would be to start working on a 6.x release that actually removes the gazillion deprecated-but-still-present-and-thus-used things in the language.