I've followed, and sometimes participated in, variations of this discussion since 1989. I wrote up an article about this topic on the Yakking blog, recently: ht

I've followed, and sometimes participated in, variations of this discussion since 1989. I wrote up an article about this topic on the Yakking blog, recently: http://yakking.branchable.com/posts/comparative-freeness/ http://yakking.branchable.com/posts/comparative-freeness/ It's not a useful discussion that will ever go well, so I'm not surprised it's a big subthread on HN.