The Year of the Kludge

Some days ago, I put back on this blog. Today I dedicated about half an hour to the forum we used to run here on akropolix.

This means reading a lot of PHP. More PHP than I like to see in a whole year. I've yet to recover.

It's exciting to see this big PHP applications work after you have read their code: I just couldn't believe my eyes. The application kind of works, with all its bugs and vulnerabilities, but does work. I'm actually using it. And as long as I don't have to see its code... After all, I have no guarantees on the code quality of most proprietary desktop applications I use (not that open source applications are necessarily better as some suggest). Why bothering about PHP web applications after all?

The point is that their code seems a kind of ordered set of kludges that lead to some approximation of a working application. It's the way most PHP applications are developed.

Many people write PHP code without the slightest clue of software engineering good practices. They often do not know typical web design patterns as well, let alone "classical" design patterns. They just write the code and fix it until it kind of works. The point is that they can do that: PHP allows (and encourages, in my opinion) this strategy.

Using frameworks like Django, you need to write sensibly less code. Most functionalities are already implemented in the framework. But you have to study the framework. You just can't improvise on a dubious architecture gluing together code snippets. And surprisingly the "good" strategy is perceived as harder. You have to be tidy and precise. You have to think. You have to design. You are strongly encouraged to test your software. You are led towards good software practices. And most people do not want to learn. They just want to get their job done. No matters they could save a lot of time doing things properly.

On the other hand, in standard PHP you can just write some messy code and fix it until it seems to work. This is the very idea on which Visual Basic was created. You don't need to know how to do things. You can just stammer code. But the point is not PHP or Visual Basic. There's plenty of languages that allow code stammer. You can write horrible kludges in C, C++, Java, Perl, whatever. And many people just do that.

Moreover, they tend to favour technologies that do not make it blatantly clear how poorly skilled and unwilling to learn they are. The result is that inferior technologies proliferate as incompetents do. By the way, this does not imply that every PHP developer is incompetent, I'm just talking about technologies and how people perceive their ease of use.