pkmnfrk: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?