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I don't think it is fair to compare loc on an application that needs to support the needs of many thousands of individuals with an application that needs to sup

I don't think it is fair to compare loc on an application that needs to support the needs of many thousands of individuals with an application that needs to support 1. The more users of something like wordpress that you have the more edge cases you find. I can write a blog in 1200 lines of PHP but I don't think I could convince myself it has anywhere near the features, considerations or polish that something like wordpress will have. As for the cloud plugin I haven't looked at it but it appears as though the boilerplate is just a way to add an easy method for customization something his lacks. So we end up with less code but less features and more difficult to get up, keep up or customize. I fail to see how this is a point for Clojure.

jrockway 18y ago
Wordpress doesn't have polish. It has some HTML that looks nice, but doesn't perform well and is completely unmaintainable. FWIW, I am also writing a real replacement for Wordpress: http://blog.jrock.us/articles/Ernst,%20Angerwhale,%20the%20Future%20of%20Perl%20Web%20Frameworks,%20and%20Deleted%20Email.pod http://blog.jrock.us/articles/Ernst,%20Angerwhale,%20the%20F... (that article also rambles on and on and on about unrelated things).
- sanswork 18y ago
  Wordpress has a lot of features that most people overlook when implementing their own blog platforms. I'm not saying it is a great system to develop with but it handles a lot more use cases than most systems I see people comparing it with. People regularly compare things like the Rails demo blog with wordpress as an example of why PHP/wordpress is bad. It could certainly be better but it's understandable as to why it's not pretty under the hood. Trying to be everything for everyone usually results in ugly systems.
- jawngee 18y ago
  If wordpress is unmaintainable then why do they keep releasing new versions of it? How come so many people use it? And you're writing it in Perl? Sounds maintainable!
  - jrockway 18y ago
    Some people like hacking things, making them work, and then leaving it even more broken for the next person. I don't, which is why I can't work on Wordpress. Every time you change the code, it should be cleaner than it was before, especially if the code is a project that you expect other people to be able to easily start working on. As to your other point, nice troll.
    - jawngee 18y ago
      But other people work on Wordpress all of the time. The sheer number of plugins, themes, etc. all testify to that. And if it's so broken, then why do so many people deploy it day after day? Can you cite specific examples of where it is broken? Or why don't you say what you really mean: Because it's written in PHP it must be junk. And, seriously, who is trolling who? You posted how broken it was, and that you're building something new and better, but don't provide any examples of how Wordpress is broken exactly. I can have Wordpress installed and working in under 15 minutes. I'm not sure how that is broken.
      - jrockway 18y ago
        Like I said, it's easy to hack anything to do exactly what you want. The hard part is making your hack work with other hacks. How many Wordpress plugins can you install before things randomly break? How do you detect breakage, anyway? (Do all plugins have test suites? Can you compose these test suites to ensure that two plugins don't break each other?) How are variable and class namespace conflicts handled? How are conflicting database schema changes handled? Is there a way to request similar information from the database in two places without doing two queries? Is there a cache that can consistently share pieces of data between two plugins? I could go on and on, and the answer to most of these things is no. Most of the time, it doesn't matter because the plugin is "too simple" to break things. But simplicity has its limits -- there are a lot of features that Wordpress is missing that I trivially implemented in my Angerwhale prototype (cleanly). As to the number of extensions, it's simple. Wordpress is the only blogging solution out there, and there are millions of PHP programmers. (OK, there is MT also. But MT killed itself with weird licensing, and lost all of its mindshare. Oops.) Those two factors combine to create a huge ecosystem. But it doesn't say much about the design of Wordpress, other than "it works well enough for people with simple needs, and rewriting a whole blogging engine would take a little more time than hacking Wordpress for this one site." Anyway, sometimes good enough is good enough. Sometimes it isn't.

jrockway 18y ago

Wordpress doesn't have polish. It has some HTML that looks nice, but doesn't perform well and is completely unmaintainable. FWIW, I am also writing a real replacement for Wordpress: http://blog.jrock.us/articles/Ernst,%20Angerwhale,%20the%20Future%20of%20Perl%20Web%20Frameworks,%20and%20Deleted%20Email.pod http://blog.jrock.us/articles/Ernst,%20Angerwhale,%20the%20F... (that article also rambles on and on and on about unrelated things).

sanswork 18y ago
Wordpress has a lot of features that most people overlook when implementing their own blog platforms. I'm not saying it is a great system to develop with but it handles a lot more use cases than most systems I see people comparing it with. People regularly compare things like the Rails demo blog with wordpress as an example of why PHP/wordpress is bad. It could certainly be better but it's understandable as to why it's not pretty under the hood. Trying to be everything for everyone usually results in ugly systems.
jawngee 18y ago
If wordpress is unmaintainable then why do they keep releasing new versions of it? How come so many people use it? And you're writing it in Perl? Sounds maintainable!
- jrockway 18y ago
  Some people like hacking things, making them work, and then leaving it even more broken for the next person. I don't, which is why I can't work on Wordpress. Every time you change the code, it should be cleaner than it was before, especially if the code is a project that you expect other people to be able to easily start working on. As to your other point, nice troll.
  - jawngee 18y ago
    But other people work on Wordpress all of the time. The sheer number of plugins, themes, etc. all testify to that. And if it's so broken, then why do so many people deploy it day after day? Can you cite specific examples of where it is broken? Or why don't you say what you really mean: Because it's written in PHP it must be junk. And, seriously, who is trolling who? You posted how broken it was, and that you're building something new and better, but don't provide any examples of how Wordpress is broken exactly. I can have Wordpress installed and working in under 15 minutes. I'm not sure how that is broken.
    - jrockway 18y ago
      Like I said, it's easy to hack anything to do exactly what you want. The hard part is making your hack work with other hacks. How many Wordpress plugins can you install before things randomly break? How do you detect breakage, anyway? (Do all plugins have test suites? Can you compose these test suites to ensure that two plugins don't break each other?) How are variable and class namespace conflicts handled? How are conflicting database schema changes handled? Is there a way to request similar information from the database in two places without doing two queries? Is there a cache that can consistently share pieces of data between two plugins? I could go on and on, and the answer to most of these things is no. Most of the time, it doesn't matter because the plugin is "too simple" to break things. But simplicity has its limits -- there are a lot of features that Wordpress is missing that I trivially implemented in my Angerwhale prototype (cleanly). As to the number of extensions, it's simple. Wordpress is the only blogging solution out there, and there are millions of PHP programmers. (OK, there is MT also. But MT killed itself with weird licensing, and lost all of its mindshare. Oops.) Those two factors combine to create a huge ecosystem. But it doesn't say much about the design of Wordpress, other than "it works well enough for people with simple needs, and rewriting a whole blogging engine would take a little more time than hacking Wordpress for this one site." Anyway, sometimes good enough is good enough. Sometimes it isn't.