Sure there are bigger issues, and I think this guy has correctly identified death-by-design as a large part of the reason for those issues. I'm not sure if PHP

Sure there are bigger issues, and I think this guy has correctly identified death-by-design as a large part of the reason for those issues. I'm not sure if PHP was explicitly designed to die, or if it just came out that way because that makes sense for the problem it was originally trying to solve in the context it was originally trying to solve it in. It doesn't really matter though -- the language hasn't sloughed off the nature of that original problem and its context. Your point about it being the wrong tool for those jobs is, in my opinion, correct -- on the gripping hand though, the jobs it is appropriate for are appearing less and less frequently, and the places that have PHP codebases that suddenly need to scale out and/or run long-running jobs are going to (more often than not) hammer it in to some weird mold that kinda resembles a more appropriate (but not really working) tool for that job if you squint just right. Search bugs.php.net by notabug sometime, or by wontfix, or just browse around randomly.