Laura Thompson has a quick post to her blog explaining one simple fact that all developers (or really anyone even loosely related to computing systems) should remember - all systems suck.

I've been thinking a lot about this idea lately. I've spent a lot of years as an engineer and consultant fixing other people's systems that suck, writing my own systems that suck, and working on legacy systems, that, well, suck. Don't let anyone fool you. All systems suck, to a greater or lesser extent

She presents her "slightly jaded" points of view about legacy systems, current systems and ones yet to be built nothing that, no matter how impressive and well-planned out they are, they'll still suck (some maybe just a bit less than others).

Here's the punchline: sucking is like scaling. You just have to keep on top of it, keep fixing and refactoring and improving and rewriting as you go. Sometimes you can manage the suck in a linear fashion with bug fixes and refactoring, and sometimes you need a phase change where you re-do parts or all of the system to recover from suckiness.

The PHP community definitely has its choice of frameworks to choose from - CakePHP, Zend Framework, Solar, Symfony - but according to Paul Jones there's some that "suck less".

I don't mean to put words in her mouth, but I'd prefer to extend Laura's phrasing a bit. I'd argue that "all frameworks from other people suck". The "other people" part is important here. It sucks to have to learn how someone else wants you to work, and that's a big part of what a framework needs from you: to learn how to use it. Learning someone else's code is much less rewarding in the short term than writing your own code.

He suggests that your framework is better because of just that - its yours. You know how it works, the ins and outs of the features and how its been refined down to just what's really needed. He does point out, though, that:

Sturgeon's law says 90% of everything sucks, and the development world is no different. Almost nothing is perfect for every developer: there's always significant room for valid criticism on any project, and even the best projects are lacking in at least one vital area (and that area is different for each project).

Demian Turner has passed along an "indepth and informative" comment from the PHP London mailing list he saw about WordPress involving some of the things that suck about it.

We did http://ftalphaville.ft.com using Wordpress, and speaking as someone who's actually had to wade through pretty much the whole codebase, let me tell you it seriously sucks.

Their highlights include messing with the raw POST data to limit access, function calls chained eight long and comments like "This probably isn't needed anymore" all over the place.