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PHP: a fractal of bad design (fuzzy notepad)PHP: a fractal of bad design (fuzzy notepad)Posted Apr 17, 2012 7:40 UTC (Tue) by khim (subscriber, #9252)In reply to: PHP: a fractal of bad design (fuzzy notepad) by Chousuke Parent article: PHP: a fractal of bad design (fuzzy notepad)
PHP awfulness and it's popularity are two sides of the same coin: PHP is built to keep chugging along at all costs. When faced with either doing something nonsensical or aborting with an error, it will do something nonsensical. Anything is better than nothing. This is what makes it usable for non-programmers (it's actually pretty easy to create something which works if you use it just right) and this is what makes it bad fit for the large projects. Sadly successful small projects tend to grow thus we are stuck with this abomination.
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PHP: a fractal of bad design (fuzzy notepad) Posted Apr 17, 2012 9:20 UTC (Tue) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167) [Link]
Excel is the same way. Every big number-crunching outfit knows that you mustn't build big important things out of Excel, even if they had to learn that the hard way. Yet, inevitably, somebody in those outfits is doing something in Excel because it was fast and they knew how. One day their pet project will get scaled up and it'll fall to pieces because it's built out of Excel when it really shouldn't be.
Excel has lots of the same frustrating properties. For example reluctance to announce failure (always better to eat reference errors, invalid inputs, etc. and spit out a superficially plausible answer anyway). But backwards compatibility is vital, so most of the problems can never be fixed, or if they are, they'll cause even more unexpected pain and misery for existing users.
PHP: a fractal of bad design (fuzzy notepad) Posted Apr 17, 2012 15:47 UTC (Tue) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]
The financial industry runs on Excel.
Most people would think that the large banks, financial execuatives, and top teir accountants would use all sorts of fancy custom software for doing taxes, accounts, figuring out contracts and business loans...
This is far from the reality.
The truth is that while they have custom apps like any other large business, Excel front-end tied to real databases is the principal application. That is app #1.
PHP: a fractal of bad design (fuzzy notepad) Posted Apr 17, 2012 16:58 UTC (Tue) by sorpigal (subscriber, #36106) [Link]
The situation is the same for MS Access, only so much worse. Excel's is bug-free, predictable and of limited scope (at least by comparison). There's only so much trouble you can get in to with Excel, with Access you generally shoot yourself in the foot in slow-motion such that nothing really works but no one can tell until months or years down the line when it finally is revealed that all that excellent data you'd been basing your operations on is:
(1) Incomplete
This is what happens when rank amateurs are left in charge of database design on a DBMS which allows you to get away with anything and relegates access control to an optional afterthought.
To keep this topical, I think the bad reputation of PHP web apps can be partly blamed on MySQL. If ever a language like PHP could meet its perfect partner in doing friendly disservice to its users, mysql is it.
PHP: a fractal of bad design (fuzzy notepad) Posted Apr 17, 2012 10:31 UTC (Tue) by bersl2 (subscriber, #34928) [Link] Well, except when it's faced with doing something expected... then it errors out.
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