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Although Rasmus is quite clearly right to have fixed the undefined behaviour and is probably quite charming in person, if anyone in our company responded to one

Although Rasmus is quite clearly right to have fixed the undefined behaviour and is probably quite charming in person, if anyone in our company responded to one of our customers like that, well, there'd be trouble. He could've saved himself a lot of grief if his first reply had been: Hi, I'm sorry to hear this change has broken your existing code. We've been cleaning up undefined behaviours such as the one you're relying on in this release and this particular fix has been reviewed and accepted by the community over a 3 month period, so there's no chance to revert it now. Going forward, you can either patch your code to stop relying on the undocumented behaviour (e.g. cast the string to a float) or you're also free to modify the PHP source to return to the previous behaviour - one of the benefits of relying on an open source framework. Best regards, Rasmus Lerdorf, creator of PHP Sadly, this would never have appeared on HN and thus brightend up my Monday morning.

ionfish 17y ago
Presumably the people in your company aren't unpaid volunteers.
- wendroid 17y ago
  > From September 2002 to November 6th 2009, he had been employed by Yahoo! Inc. as an Infrastructure Architecture Engineer. Some might say "PHP developer"
  - ionfish 17y ago
    They might indeed, but the person filing the bug report in question (in their capacity as a user of PHP, at any rate) is not a customer of Yahoo! Inc., and thus Rasmus' employment there is irrelevant to the point at hand. That point, rhetoric aside, is that the reporter is not party to a commercial contract with the people who fix bugs in PHP, whoever they might happen to be. Consequently, there should not be the "trouble" that moconnor asserted would occur should anyone in his organisation respond to a customer in that manner. The two parties simply do not have that relationship. The phrase "unpaid volunteer" comes from Rasmus himself, in the bug report under discussion: "Wow, a classic case of how not to treat unpaid volunteers who provide critical pieces of your money-making infrastructure."
gcb 17y ago
he could also tested his damn application before upgrading php. in his make up world that makes it too dificult to fix his code, he would have to go trhu 7 levels of testing hell... so why not apply it to the platform?

ionfish 17y ago

Presumably the people in your company aren't unpaid volunteers.

wendroid 17y ago
> From September 2002 to November 6th 2009, he had been employed by Yahoo! Inc. as an Infrastructure Architecture Engineer. Some might say "PHP developer"
- ionfish 17y ago
  They might indeed, but the person filing the bug report in question (in their capacity as a user of PHP, at any rate) is not a customer of Yahoo! Inc., and thus Rasmus' employment there is irrelevant to the point at hand. That point, rhetoric aside, is that the reporter is not party to a commercial contract with the people who fix bugs in PHP, whoever they might happen to be. Consequently, there should not be the "trouble" that moconnor asserted would occur should anyone in his organisation respond to a customer in that manner. The two parties simply do not have that relationship. The phrase "unpaid volunteer" comes from Rasmus himself, in the bug report under discussion: "Wow, a classic case of how not to treat unpaid volunteers who provide critical pieces of your money-making infrastructure."

gcb 17y ago

he could also tested his damn application before upgrading php. in his make up world that makes it too dificult to fix his code, he would have to go trhu 7 levels of testing hell... so why not apply it to the platform?