[smt88]

The best-engineered technology is rarely the most popular. I'd be interested to see a list of well-written code bases that are also popular.

The interesting thing about PHP (the program) is that, in my experience, the code doesn't suck because it was hastily written or because it was written a long time. It sucks because the people who write it and work on it have bizarre, nonsensical philosophies about writing code. I've seen some talks by the PHP maintainers (as recently as 2013) that made me want to throw something at my monitor.

[andrewflnr]

llvm and redis have good reputations. sqlite, I think. Lua. llvm in particular seems to owe its popularity to good structure, though it does seem to be an exception that highlights the common case.

[vhost-]

Checkout the Nginx source. It's pretty damn good.

[steve_b]

do you have any links to these talks? thanks!

[smt88]

I can't find the one I was thinking of, and I don't want to comb through literally hours of video to figure it out. This should illustrate my point, though:

https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Rasmus_Lerdorf

And also here where he makes a breaking commit without running unit tests first:

http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/jsudd/you_see_r...

[jsmeaton]

Need an excuse to buy a new monitor by any chance? :)