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Comment by dewey | Hacker News Reader

And yet, despite the horrible code, it's still powering an Alexa Top 500 page without any huge problems I've heard of.

Why would bad code hold them back? The technical debt of quick and dirty code lets you get things out faster now at the cost of development time later on (and uptime if you're very slapdash).

I don't blame people for buying into the TDD and other perfectionist bandwagons, until very recently the zeal around the topics meant that you couldn't question the fervent push for very narrow and specific types of software quality. I mean, people were saying "tests are documentation" and I had to nod my head and smile just so I wouldn't get trounced by folks without the development experience to know why that wouldn't work, but had read a blog post saying it does.

4chan doesn't need good code. Of course it wouldn't hurt, but if the main point of good code is test-ability and organization for complicated projects... Well, 4chan just isn't a very complicated project. The simplicity is a design decision from what I've read moot say.

Crazy. I knew PHP was bad, but this is just terrible.

I know hating on PHP is en vogue but you could probably write the same ugly code with another language too.

Yes you could, but it's harder. extract($_GET) does not look as bad as eval(request.GET) but it's almost the same thing for example.

Not possible. Other languages have features to prevent this.

I highly doubt you have anything else to add because I'm sure you're just another person jumping on the "hate php" bandwagon - but go on, entertain me.

Please elaborate.

Most languages dont have extract($_POST) and hop,everything's overwritten... PHP has a lot of shit like this.Yeah you dont have to use them,but they shouldnt be here at first place,if PHP core devs cared about a sane API. PHP doesnt have a sane API. PHP core devs dont give a damn. That's why facebook developped Hack and HHVM.

Sorry to anyone who down voted me. I didn't mean PHP is a bad language. It has done amazing things for the web. I just didn't like the look of the many snippets of HTML in the code which is more common in PHP than in other languages in web development.

what if I told you PHP does not require you to write ugly code? You can do the same in any other language.

Oh, i'm completely aware of that. I was just really talking about this document, didn't mean to spark the debate.

but it makes it incredibly easy to, which is the reason why people hate it. If I'm a good programmer, of course I'll write good code. If I have to fix someone's shit code, of course I'm going to be incredibly angry if it's only there because the language encourages it.

Of course, if the language makes it very easy to write bad code, even as a good programmer I could easily end up writing stuff that's incomprehensible etc.

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