I nominate the University of Sydney for "Downtime Notice Of The Year 2012"



  • @ASheridan said:

    @gu3st said:

    PHP doesn't really make it hard to write good code. It makes the bad code just tempting to people who aren't smart enough to make the distinction between good and bad.
    The real problem though is the sheer number of bad tutorials out there still not advising about things like SQL injection, still advising the new dev to do some unbelievably stupid things.

    It's not just PHP, any language can suffer from it. Consider Javascript. jQuery is one of the best and at the same time worst things to happen to it. I've seen people do stuff in 20 lines of jQuery that could be replaced with a few lines of straight Javascript,and it still works perfectly well cross-browser

    As someone who has recently started to become knowledgeable at Javascript (after being a jQuery numpty for a long time), I can't agree with you more. There does seem to be something about the web that people manage to be absolutely retarded. I don't know if it's the seemingly low barrier to entry (everyone and their cat can build a website).. or what it is.. but the web.. people who have no business programming anything.. manage to build websites at an alarming rate.



  • @gu3st said:

    @ASheridan said:

    @gu3st said:

    PHP doesn't really make it hard to write good code. It makes the bad code just tempting to people who aren't smart enough to make the distinction between good and bad.
    The real problem though is the sheer number of bad tutorials out there still not advising about things like SQL injection, still advising the new dev to do some unbelievably stupid things.

    It's not just PHP, any language can suffer from it. Consider Javascript. jQuery is one of the best and at the same time worst things to happen to it. I've seen people do stuff in 20 lines of jQuery that could be replaced with a few lines of straight Javascript,and it still works perfectly well cross-browser

    As someone who has recently started to become knowledgeable at Javascript (after being a jQuery numpty for a long time), I can't agree with you more. There does seem to be something about the web that people manage to be absolutely retarded. I don't know if it's the seemingly low barrier to entry (everyone and their cat can build a website).. or what it is.. but the web.. people who have no business programming anything.. manage to build websites at an alarming rate.

    I wonder why anyone thinks this is any different from shitty ios apps that suck up battery life while doing nothing, or desktop programs that freeze the UI at the slightest provocation. The only difference is that we look at a much broader range of websites than other types of applications, so we get a much larger sample size.


  • Considered Harmful

    @pkmnfrk said:

    @gu3st said:
    @ASheridan said:

    @gu3st said:

    PHP doesn't really make it hard to write good code. It makes the bad code just tempting to people who aren't smart enough to make the distinction between good and bad.
    The real problem though is the sheer number of bad tutorials out there still not advising about things like SQL injection, still advising the new dev to do some unbelievably stupid things.

    It's not just PHP, any language can suffer from it. Consider Javascript. jQuery is one of the best and at the same time worst things to happen to it. I've seen people do stuff in 20 lines of jQuery that could be replaced with a few lines of straight Javascript,and it still works perfectly well cross-browser

    As someone who has recently started to become knowledgeable at Javascript (after being a jQuery numpty for a long time), I can't agree with you more. There does seem to be something about the web that people manage to be absolutely retarded. I don't know if it's the seemingly low barrier to entry (everyone and their cat can build a website).. or what it is.. but the web.. people who have no business programming anything.. manage to build websites at an alarming rate.

    I wonder why anyone thinks this is any different from shitty ios apps that suck up battery life while doing nothing, or desktop programs that freeze the UI at the slightest provocation. The only difference is that we look at a much broader range of websites than other types of applications, so we get a much larger sample size.

    I think the difference is that the source code is easier to view so everyone can see and point and laugh. I conjecture a proportionate number of closed-source applications are just as bad under the covers.



  • @pkmnfrk said:

    I wonder why anyone thinks this is any different from shitty ios apps that suck up battery life while doing nothing, or desktop programs that freeze the UI at the slightest provocation. The only difference is that we look at a much broader range of websites than other types of applications, so we get a much larger sample size.

    Yeah. Sometimes I catch myself thinking "I just need to get away from web development and I won't have to deal with this kind of wilful incompetence any more." Fortunately TDWTF provides me with a daily reality check for this notion.

    However, I do still cling to the hope that things will improve somewhat when I eventually manage to get out of *PHP* web development. PHP development is like DeviantART: almost everybody is producing terrible, ugly things, and their eye for quality is so underdeveloped that they don't even see how bad their work is.

    There are so many "PHP-only" developers with whom I've worked who actively resist the use of tools and practices that improve code quality. Things like testability, reusability, maintainability: I've seen these things dismissed as "over-engineering" by senior "PHP-only" colleagues in a couple of different workplaces at this point. There seems to be widespread belief in a sort of carte blanche artistic license when it comes to whether something is "good code" or not.

    What never ceases to amaze me is the lengths these people are willing to go to in order to work around the resulting garbage. They'll happily spend an entire week testing a simple design change to an email simply because it was too much work to write code that could be tested or even executed outside of the live production environment. Why not learn from one of these experiences and next time try to avoid writing indecipherable stream-of-consciousness code?



  • @pkmnfrk said:

    I wonder why anyone thinks this is any different from shitty ios apps that suck up battery life while doing nothing
    It's not just iOS. The DrawSomething app on Android eats through my battery faster than a starving rat. It doesn't really need to run the full app in the background, but it seems to :-/


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @gu3st said:

    I don't know if it's the seemingly low barrier to entry (everyone and their cat can build a website)..
    You make it sound like a special case. It's not. Even dead cats can get diplomas for example.


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