While trawling through some legacy web application code today, a paraphase of Greenspun’s tenth rule of programming occurred: “Any sufficiently complex 3-tier application will start to resemble an ad-hoc, buggy, poorly implemented version of an existing open source framework.”

Original quote: “Any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad hoc informally-specified bug-ridden slow implementation of half of Common Lisp.”