Taylor Otwell, inventor and maintainer of popular PHP framework Laravel, is warning against overly complex code and the risks of bypassing the framework. From a report: Developers are sometimes drawn to building "cathedrals of complexity that aren't so easy to change," he said, speaking in a podcast for maintainable.fm, a series produced by Ruby on Rails consultancy Planet Argon. Software, he said, should be "simple and disposable and easy to change." Some problems are genuinely complex, but in general, if a developer finds a "clever solution" which goes beyond the standard documented way in a framework such as Laravel or Ruby on Rails, "that would be like a smell." A code smell -- for the uninitiated in the The Reg readership -- is a term developers use for code that works but may cause problems at a later date. Otwell described himself as a "pretty average programmer" but reckons many others are the same, solving basic problems as quickly and efficiently as they can.
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