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Comment by space_fountain | Hacker News Reader

Hopefully I'm not in the minority when I say there's another side to this too though.

Working now at my first job I can't tell you how annoying it is to try to update ancient php with essentially no code reuse. Sure it's simple, but basically unmaintainable.

Also from the same job, but I continue to work hard to try to convince others that using prepared statements is worth the slight extra effort. If I hadn't made it significantly easier it would never get used at all and we'd see way more string appending

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Please don't complain about old code not written to today's standards. There are reasons why code can be bad and you don't know what they are. Accept the code is what it is, improve it where you can, and learn something about the crap a developer before you have had to go through when they wrote it. Even the worst hacks often aren't because they were a bad developer.

You'll have your share of terrible projects that force you to write horrible code without decent requirements to unreasonable deadlines for a client that won't listen. You'll hate what you write. You'll always want to go back and rewrite it but you'll never have the budget. You might quit your job over it. It certainly won't be a reflection of your skill or passion for writing great code. The "ancient PHP code" you're working with now probably isn't a reflection of the developer who wrote it either.

You're definitely right. My point got a little side tracked by my own partially unfounded frustration. I'm just trying to say some level of abstraction is worth it. Not always, and not in every case, but at least in some. Yes the code wasn't written with abstraction in large part because it's old, but it would have been better if it had been.

Simple and unmaintainable? These two don't go together. Maybe it's ancient and a mess... People have known how to write unmaintainable code for decades.

I feel like I used simple differently from how you must mean it. A PHP app with no libraries or abstraction is very simple in one way of thinking, I don't think coding that way makes things easier in any way at all.

Post the URL of the site pages that aren't using prepared statements, and I'm sure someone will make the argument for you. ;-)

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