> Complex in the sense that they were originally thrown together and the results of the program might best be described as "stochastic output", yeah I can agree with that.
Absolutely, they are complex because of poor initial designs, and actually even more complex now due to all the efforts to maintain backwards compatibility...
> Sure, but it sure seems funny that "high quality code" is nearly non-existent in PHP and javascript world ...
jQuery is an incredibly well engineered library by John Resig. I think that jQuery was one of the big technological leaps forward that led to the proliferation of web applications.
For a long time, people thought that cross browser JS inconsistencies and confusing API standards meant that you couldn't build interactive UI applications in the browser. And now they are ubiquitous.
So I guess it depends on your definition of "high quality code". I don't think quality code is about some arbitrary coding aesthetic. It's about results, and it's about what your code does, and how it creates value.