Nobody seems to have noticed that Matt Mullenweg stopped responding to everyone everywhere (including HN) after they hired the external law firm. They likely told him to shut up.
> That's why the WordPress code is still spaghetti more than 15 years after it was originally launched. For the good of the customers.
Thats actually true. Backward compatibility was and still is the #1 thing in WP, and its why it won over the web: No small business or individual customer cares about 'better code' in the backend if those 'improvements' break their websites. This was what a lot of wordpress competitors did in the past and they suffered for it.
No, the spaghetti code has always been bad for customers. Security exploits, hacked-together functionality that can't be improved until Matt decides to make the breaking change that forcibly breaks hundreds of plugins, etc., random bugs that nobody understands, poor performance requiring expensive and extensive modifications to achieve basic levels of responsiveness that makes even Java look like a speedster.
Backwards compatibility is just the excuse Matt has been using from the beginning to justify how abysmally bad the code is.
> No, the spaghetti code has always been bad for customers
Never ever seen one single non-technical website owner or user complain about 'spaghetti code'. As for 'code quality affecting other things', that's our (programmers') exaggeration:
> Security exploits, hacked-together functionality that can't be improved
NASA, White House, CNN, Reuters, Techcrunch and a thousand other gigantic organizations use Wordpress and they arent getting hacked.
Neither any of the small to medium businesses that use wp for their own websites, marketing sites or ecommerce sites - as long as they keep their site and plugins updated.
> poor performance requiring expensive and extensive modifications to achieve basic levels of responsiveness
I dont know where you are pulling that out from. Default wp can do 1.5 seconds load time from start to finish and get 99, 100, 99 scores in google page speed. Even with a good theme, its still as fast.
> Backwards compatibility is just the excuse
Its not the excuse. Its the #1 concern of small and medium businesses and individuals, and whenever it was violated WP or any plugin, droves of them left the WP ecosystem or stopped using such plugins.
Really, what we concern ourselves as programmers and what the overwhelming majority of users on the internet concern themselves with, have a huge chasm in between them.
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