> but only recently has PHP gotten around to supporting it
You're talking about the `[]` short-hand for arrays, right? That was released in version 5.4, in March 2012, I wouldn't really say that's "recent", at least in my opinion.
It is still relatively recent, if you consider how many older PHP installs are out there. I've had to write around this on a few projects, when I found out my client's server had no idea what the array shorthand or namespaces were.
