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Comment by jconley | Hacker News Reader

Regardless of merit on either side, the attitude presented by the creator of PHP in this post makes PHP and open source in general look bad. Seriously? I still can't believe that's how the situation was handled.

EDIT: Rasmus calls the bug reporter an idiot in the first reply. It's probably some sysadmin that has been tasked with upgrading the infrastructure and really has no idea what to do. So rude. It would take just as long to write: "Sorry about the inconvenience. We changed this undefined behavior for consistency's sake. You could cast the first argument to a float like: '[sample code]' and you'll get the old behavior back. One of our consulting partners [link] could help you with that if you'd like." Instead, Rasmus set the tone that he was superior from the onset.

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Can you imagine how many fools like this Rasmus Lerdorf has to deal with, every. single. day. since he created PHP? Same for Linus Torvalds. After a while, you just stop trying to sugar-coat idiocy, and just tell them as it is.

Perhaps it was not like this when PHP was created, but it surely has been for a long while now: Idiots are now PHP's target audience be it by design or by its own faults. So if Rasmus Lerdorf still maintains PHP then he should not get angry by the kind of users he chose and/or deserves.

That's a bit harsh. Like with Java or Perl, there's an enormous installed base of PHP apps which need maintaining and upgrading (and replacing, wherever possible); a lot of people end up inheriting systems they didn't build, and having to keep them up _ad libitum_.

Sure, but those who inherit PHP systems may not belong to the PHP's target audience that I was referring to. Neither must all people who choose to use PHP necessarily idiots, because PHP does have some legitimate use cases. But all in all I don't think PHP maintainers can expect sanity from their users as a general population nowadays. I know it sounds harsh, and it probably is a bit judgmental on my part too, but I hope you get the idea.

To be honest, I think Rasmus shows some class in how he deals with the issue... others may have been far more abusive.

Can you imagine how Linus would have handled it? I think Rasmus was fairly composed.

I'm honestly chuckling at the thought of Linus responding to this one in Rasmus' place.

If you need the features of an old version, use the old version. Simple as that. Don't expect the rest of the world to be stuck with dealing with backward compatibility just so you aren't inconvenienced. Upgrade, pay for support, move to another platform, or stop complaining.

Linus would have called the guy an idiot for not using straight C.

And being rusty in it no less.

I quite agree. It doesn't cost a thing to behave like a gentleman, and people usually respond well to it. And if they don't, being rude is unlikely to work any better, and could just leave them feeling justifiably resentful. Rudeness is not the winning strategy.

How many downvotes did you get? :) Apparently you get downvoted nowadays for having an unpopular opinion. Strange.

Why is one person working on one ancient project the face of open source?

"One person" isn't. Rasmus isn't the only contributor to PHP, but it is his baby (originally released as his Personal Home Page Tools in the Long, Long Ago). That other people have worked on and contributed to PHP over the years doesn't change the fact that he's the creator of PHP.

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