[kypro]

I've realised that many codebases I considered "good" in the past I now consider to be kinda "bad", but more notably there are codebases which I thought were "bad" in the past which I now view with more appreciation.

Codebases are kinda like cars. What's a "good" car? Is it a car with a large trunk and comfortable driving experience, or is it a car which does 0-60 in 2 seconds? The answer depends a lot on what you want to do and what your preferences are.

There are obviously objectively bad codebases, but I think a lot of codebases I considered bad in the past were just built in a way I wasn't comfortable with or was optimising for something that it didn't appreciate at the time. Ever noticed how it's common for JS devs to hate Java projects, and for Java devs to hate JS projects? I think that's probably because they're optimising for different things and are used to working on codebases which incorporate those priorities.

But to answer your actual question, my core languages are PHP, Node and Java. By far the worst codebases I've worked on have been the Java ones because they tend to both be larger, older (full of legacy code) and more likely to be over-engineered. Crappy code in a PHP project is probably more common, but generally you can just strip it out and refactor without much consequence. In Java projects everything tend to be much more interconnected which makes refactoring difficult.

Age of a project, the number of short-term contractors and junior devs on the project, and a lack of high-level architectural discussions within a team tend to be the largest collating factors to a bad codebases in my experience.