
Fractally Broken - NiallBunting
https://niallbunting.com/fractally/broken/daily/2020/06/18/fractally-broken.html
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aiiane
Wouldn't be surprised if the phrase originated from
[https://eev.ee/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-
design/](https://eev.ee/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-design/)

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echelon
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.

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hinkley
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.

