> The true lesson learned for language developers is: Don't break backwards compatibility. Ever.

Certainly true, and yet this is the situation that led to a lot of the hate for C++.

The reason for the numerous meanings of the "static" keyword for example is because if you introduce more keywords then you might break peoples code that used those proposed keywords as variable names.

And then of course a large percentage of C++'s baggage is due to backwards compatibility with C in the first place. Without that baggage C++ would be a much better language and yet you can't deny C++'s success from that decision.

So the moral of the story is that you either make a language nobody uses or you continue to cop flak for all your old decisions forever.