Yep, so named because it was a heroisch (heroic; strong) painkiller.

Please note that the article disagrees with the headline. It states explicitly that there was no request.

In other words, the author feels free to lie to you.

I recall a case-insensitivity bug from the early days of Mac OS X.

There are three command-line utilities that are distributed as part of the Perl HTTP library: GET, HEAD, and POST. These are for performing the HTTP operations of those names from the command line.

But there’s also a POSIX-standard utility for extracting the first few lines of a text file. It’s called head.

I think you see where I’m going with this. HEAD and head are the same name in a case-insensitive filesystem such as the classic Mac filesystem. They are different names on a Unix-style filesystem.

Installing /usr/bin/HEAD from libwww-perl onto a Mac with the classic filesystem overwrote /usr/bin/head and broke various things.

Don’t worry too much about the duplicated effort of different projects implementing the same standard on their own. It’s good to have lots of implementations of a standard. That’s what makes it a standard rather than just some code we all depend on.

Meanwhile over in the mechanical engineering department, someone is complaining that they have to learn physics when they just wanted to build cool cars.