[OldSchool]

I imagine anyone who's been around for long at all has written what someone would call "shit code."

Hindsight is 20/20. Imagine auto makers comparing product today with those from 50 years ago? That's about how far we've progressed in 10-15 years in this industry. Were those guys whose contemporaries were able to send people to the moon on CNC-less machine tools and computers with 4K RAM somehow doing "shit engineering?"

Imagine if what someone sees as "shit code" ultimately made yesterday's coder $1000/line because it got done while there was an opportunity to sell it. Is it still "shit code?" You're not being asked to be a music critic here. Most code is written as part of a business.

That said, code reviews are a great way to learn from and align with your team!

[BasDirks]

Good point, but writing software in PHP or Java is voluntary retardation. You're holding back the advancement of our trade.

[AlisdairO]

> Java

I call bull. Java has plenty of issues, but plenty of plus points too, particularly for large-scale development on teams that experience employee turnover.

- Reasonably fast, considering the ease of development.

- Genuinely fantastic tooling.

- Generally discourages 'fancy' programming techniques. Obviously doesn't stop shit code getting produced, but at least tends to be relatively easy for maintenance programmers who weren't heavily involved in original development to understand.

I have to use Java for some of my work, and with the correct tooling it's really not that bad. Sometimes it's fantastic - when you're maintaining someone else's code, the ability to trivially (and exhaustively) find out what code calls this code, safely refactor and so on is invaluable. Of languages in its general class, C# is significantly superior, but tied to MS if you want a full-speed VM.

I'm not saying that you're likely to produce the most beautiful code of your life in Java, but compared to many other languages (+ toolchains) I find working on other people's code is rather easy.