Brian Moon has called for the death of die():

Now, I have no actual authority to do so. My PHP CVS karma does not extend that far. And I doubt it will actually get removed despite it being nothing more than an alias for exit now. No, what I would like to call a death to is the usage of die such as [echoing out a message to the user instead of doing proper error handling].

He points out a few perfectly viable alternatives like the exception handlers, the trigger_error function and custom error handlers.