Slashdot picked up a story today about PHP finally getting a namespace operator. Good news, until you hear that the operator is the backslash("\"). They reasoned out why this wasn't terrible, but there has been considerable backlash to using the backslash.
I have to agree with all of the backlash. The big complaint is that the backslash is the "universal" escape operator, allowing for special characters to be represented like NULL and carriage return. The problem is not just in how foreign the backslash-syntax is (other languages use . or ::), but in how much someone has to understand PHP before they can properly use it and how careful they will have to be to not royally break their code.
This is making me really think about the next language I should learn (or pick back up). I'm not thrilled that they would reason through things the way that they did, with the credentials they had set, and still end up with the backslash as the resulting operator. I am seriously disappointed.