I never thought to I'd say this about an open-source project, but if I wanted to single out an unbeatable case of "Bad Design", and the manifestation of the term "Redundancy Hell", It is definitely Calibre.

Single job: To keep some e-book files + some metadata.
What it does in brief: In a single dir as your library; From metadata stored IN each file; It generates subdirs <author_name>/<title_name>(<some_numerical_id>), copies the e-book file there, generates a jpg cover from the first page and also stores it there, generates an xml file to support legacy e-book formats (but it generates it anyway even for pdfs), which contains all the same metadata for the file, including title, author and href for the cover, and also stores it there. And then, all the same metadata for all books is stored in a metadata.db in the library root folder. I don't know if there is more data stored/used somewhere in a more obfuscated way.

Not too much to ask: Change some author/title/any single field.
What is done: 💩🌋

It is so helpful, it does all the stuff by itself or its plugins; you don't have to touch anything. But it also has this amazing ability to fuck everything up without even being touched. I mean WHAT THE FUCK WERE YOU THINKING? WHAT KIND OF A FUCKING DESIGN IS THIS? A FUCKING FRACTAL?

Literally, If I had listed all my books on physical papers with a real life pen, It would take me less time that I've already wasted on unfucking the regular disasters. Fuck you and your arrogant responses to issues.

There is this dude called Richard Eng which is sort of famous for 2 things:
First: he is known as *the* Smalltall evangelist of mothern times. And he constantly writes about it. Which is fine since he tries to attract new users to this beautiful and simple little language.

Second: his constant bashing of other technologies, mainly Javascript stating that it is the most harmful tech known to man.

The thing is, saying "use this because that is shit" is never going to convince a community, specifically one as potent as that of the JS community. And to make it worse...the dude links his reasoning about bad languages to articles he wrote. As in "this is shit, look at my completely biased article regarding why its shit"

Once he is confronted about it he links back to his own writings. Much like christian fanatics do
"good is real because it says so in the bible"
"but how can you trust that resource?"
"Because the bible is the word of God"
"and how do you know?"
"Because it is in the bible"

Circular arguments like that cannot be taken seriously. And what this guy does for the Smalltalk community hurts more than it helps really.

Claims like those are all around us. If we were to believe or consider them depending on who said what then we would never have the amazing cluster of tech choices that we have.

Take c++. It is absolutely powerful and gives you the ability to do pretty much anything. If we were to take Linus Torvalds's word about it being shit and only having subpar development we would miss on absolutely powerful tools.

The same came to me from Evee, writer of "PHP a fractal of bad design" or the "Node.js is cancer" article.

You are never going to please anyone with anything. I go by live and let live, and whilst I don't like some technologies I certainly don't look down on those that do.

Maybe the blog was written in PHP as well? 🤔