Beware clever devs, says Laravel inventor Taylor Otwell • The Register

Taylor Otwell, inventor and maintainer of popular PHP framework Laravel, is warning against overly complex code and the risks of bypassing the framework.

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 l