Obviously, because s/he, the languages, stack and software he uses, his software development practices etc are all way better than the WordPress ones. Thats why they are bad. And that's why it is his language, stack and app that is 50% of all websites and 30% of all ecommerce sites in existence. Not WordPress.
So if I'm following correctly, you are saying that WordPress was successful in the first place because of its high code quality and software development practices, right?
WordPress works great from a business standpoint, but it is not well made.
I've spent the past month developing plugins for my own WordPress website, and it is laughable how bad it is. I mean, the official advice to understanding things is not to read their documentation, it's "look through the code lol" [1].
It's probably fair, since their documentation is so bad it does not explain what any of the parameters of the functions are most of the time, accepting a map that you don't know the possible values of unless you read their code.
And, well, that code was probably okay in 2005, but it's hot garbage in 2022.
>I've spent the past month developing plugins for my own WordPress website, and it is laughable how bad it is. I mean, the official advice to understanding things is not to read their documentation, it's "look through the code lol" [1].
This particular advice of looking through the code is for finding "appropriate hooks", if you've had to work with WordPress to implement a fairly customised solution then you'd have realised that you often find yourself in a place where you need to perform some task at a particular time in WP Core's or some other plugin's code's execution ( the very use-case of hooks in WP ), no documentation can effectively help you in finding the appropriate hook. With a little bit of experience in writing WP code you'd realise that it's far more easier and faster to open to source code and and look for `apply_filters` or `do_action` calls than opening documentation.
> So if I'm following correctly, you are saying that WordPress was successful in the first place because of its high code quality and software development practices, right?
WordPress was successful because it prioritized its users' needs and backwards compatibility over high code quality and software development practices.
> WordPress works great from a business standpoint
Yeah. That's whats important to 50% of the web and 30% of ecommerce websites.
> but it is not well made.
There is the critical angle - users don't give two shts about that. Many 'well made' apps, frameworks, projects faded away over the decades because they were 'well made' first, and 'user-oriented' second.
'Well made' code and 'good programming practices' made their inroads into the WP project and ecosystem in the past decade. They really did not provide much value compared to the complications they brought. And most were just discarded or they just faded away.
> I've spent the past month developing plugins for my own WordPress website, and it is laughable how bad it is
Its not. From the moment you catch on to the common practices, its a delight. Code is easy to write. Its immediately compatible with 60,000+ plugins, you immediately get access to 50% of the web. There is nothing comparable.
> the official advice to understanding things is not to read their documentation, it's "look through the code lol" [1].
That relates to the plugin ecosystem. Not the core. And for the plugin ecosystem, that is true - its faster to check through the code of many plugins than going through the documentation. If you have such a need to develop a plugin for ANOTHER plugin, which is an independent project than WP core itself, that's pretty normal. And it beats the majority of OSS projects in that sense anyway - you have flexibility.
> It's probably fair, since their documentation is so bad it does not explain what any of the parameters of the functions are most of the time
Huh? All the functions in the core have their documentation in trac and multiple other places.
> And, well, that code was probably okay in 2005, but it's hot garbage in 2022.
Users don't give a sht about that. That hot garbage in 2022 still works like it worked in 2005. The small store owner somewhere in the US or the NGO somewhere in Asia never had to upgrade anything on their site for it to keep working. THAT is why they love WordPress. Because it helps them run their businesses and lives than having them deal with programmers' trappings about 'cool code'.
...
Your approach and the approach of various others in this thread seem to be a simple case of engineers' perspective being totally out of touch with the perspectives of the actual users. You think something is 'better'. Whereas to the actual user, they are not. This actually explains how large engineering-oriented organizations like Google can fail their user base so easily.
> Your approach and the approach of various others in this thread seem to be a simple case of engineers' perspective being totally out of touch with the perspectives of the actual users.
You answered in a thread of which the initial comment was "seeing this code, I’m happy that I no longer do PHP", why would you expect us to be talking about anything else than the technical aspects?
You're just completely out of topic so I won't waste my time answering the rest of your statements.
