> The code produced simply doesn't matter. Bitrot is accepted. Nobody cares.
It's a real bug-bear of mine that, in the profession as a whole, this attitude is rarely criticised, and sometimes even praised (especially on HN with the JUST SHIP IT startup mentality).
A lot of people are fine with this and can probably offer a lot of reasons pertaining to business interests, which is fine. Those can be measured, deliberate compromises backed by sound reasoning and opportunity cost. But there's this other school of thought that just thinks, "fuck it, it's just code innit."
And it seems that newcomers to programming (in PHP/on the web) are still being taught at that school.
Total agreement. Thank you for offsetting the large number of critical but unstimulating responses with this quality one. Maintenance of a codebase is perhaps the most important part of programming. Until someone's been forced to do it long term in an environment with viciously changing requirements, they will have problems designing new, maintainable software of nontrivial complexity, in my experience.
My point in mentioning this (little discussed, IMHO) property of web development in general was that many people's experience in PHP is limited to such projects, and therefore their notional understanding of software design from a maintenance perspective is limited; most of the community are not experienced programmers. IMHO this limit has been further amplified by a reliance on frameworks which are themselves often based upon fairly questionable design decisions, and are blindly worshipped as some kind of gospel.
It's a real bug-bear of mine that, in the profession as a whole, this attitude is rarely criticised, and sometimes even praised (especially on HN with the JUST SHIP IT startup mentality).
A lot of people are fine with this and can probably offer a lot of reasons pertaining to business interests, which is fine. Those can be measured, deliberate compromises backed by sound reasoning and opportunity cost. But there's this other school of thought that just thinks, "fuck it, it's just code innit."
And it seems that newcomers to programming (in PHP/on the web) are still being taught at that school.