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Did you catch the part about "it makes you lose faith in the product"? ROFL

• justinator 8y ago
  I caught the part about, "we have unitialized variables being passed everywhere which should be numbers" and that code, well, smells. I think the PHP team changing the return value of a function without putting anything in a changelog is a Very Bad Idea and a dev. should be pretty upset about that. Saying that the main dev. is doing this work as a charitable thing is fairly misleading as well. Buuuuut, I also think passing an unitialized value like that is already a bug in this context given the type of software being created. I'd rather see, "NULL" found wherever than know that it was magically changed to 0 (like they would prefer). I know the dev. said that this is just a formatting thing, but I'll wager they're using formatted numbers for some sort of calculation (inadvertently or not). Whatever is going on, I hope there was a huge code review and a massive QA effort ( which I also doubt happened), because this is a textbook example of tech debt and the loan shark has come a-knockin'.
  • ScottBurson 8y ago
    I agree with this as far as it goes, but I think @zaphar has the better answer: a tax app should never have been written in PHP to begin with. There's a fundamental quandary in language design: accessibility to novice programmers and suitability for serious work are in opposition. Novices, being novices, are unable to appreciate this problem.
    • justinator 8y ago
      Oh dude: absolutely agreed on that.