Fractally Broken

niallbunting.com

24 pointsNiallBunting4 comments

Wouldn't be surprised if the phrase originated from https://eev.ee/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-design/

This is what came to my mind, too. I'd never heard that phrase (or analogy?) before and thought it was unusual. But it stuck.

This article made for quite the uproar when it was published. Lots of people will recognize that title. The term may have taken on a life of its own from there.

I kind of hope it catches on in the popular zeitgeist. It would be amusing if for nothing else than the fact it was presumably first used to describe PHP.

Thanks for that link, looks like it may the original source.

A variant of this I heard a bit ago is “coherent but wrong”, where the solution is self consistent, misses the target, and is hard to modify because all of the bad decisions support each other.

To fix it takes a ton of patience and some specialized skills. Everything turns into yak shaving, and if the perpetrators or their accomplices are still committing enough code, they may be able to keep pace with attempts to unravel.

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