| The "strawman" you're referring to was in response to this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4188167 specifically the complaint that this problem manifests with lots of off-the-shelf software (although I suppose he didn't specify FOSS in his original comment). However, I wasn't directly responding to that guy, I was more responding to what I feel has been aptly described as a "witch hunt" by others on this page. It might not be an easy fix if you're not familiar with PHP's guts 10 years is a long time for someone to have the chance to get familiar with it. Even if you assume that for 8 years, everyone was saying "oh, it will get fixed some time" even 2 years is a long time for anyone affected by this problem seriously enough to become familiar enough with PHP to fix the problem if that's the path that will produce the most value for them (ie. if there's enough value in some existing codebase or off the shelf software to warrant fixing this if there's truly no other workaround). Still, I can see the sense in promoting major issues like this with PHP, but posting the bug report on the front page of HN is far less useful than, say, writing a blog post about it with some case studies of where the problem has been manifest, how people have dealt with it, the history of the bug, etc. Actually that's a good blog post, might put it on my list ;) |