His copy paste fu is strong
Some people whine endlessly on forums about how terrible the code is in project X. But these people do not get it. The terrible code is a feature, not a bug. And the reason for this is what we call the "template industry". Writing HTML with inline PHP is a million dollar industry. It is a direct result of Wordpress, Jomla, Drupal, Movable Type and Google Search. So non-programmers code in the only way they know. By copy/pasting code.
But do not make fun of PHP programming. Lots of people make hundreds of thousands of dollars from sites written in PHP. Doing the same thing in Java and C# is probably much harder because most example code is based around components, shared resources, uncoupled database layers and libraries. And a $7 shared hosting plan is less of an option.
And before you knock copy/paste programmers I should tell you a little secret. I suspect some parts of the Asian programming industry pay people based on how many lines of code they alter. Because I have reduced 2000 lines of example code to just around 250. And this makes me wonder what the heck is going on in Asian software companies. Are they trying to attract business from HTML template programmers ?
The iPhone developers copy/paste fu is also strong. And he probably started out life as a HTML template guy. And we can not make fun of them either. Because hundreds of them make more money than hardcore C++, C#, Ruby, Python and Java guys do on their personal projects. I have never understood why Techcrunch is so impressive. They make less money than a fishing boat and yet many professional developers want to go on Techcrunch. And while this is happening the PHP template guy is making money simply by being in the Google index. The - big launch - is probably overrated.
Although, today many template programmers have seen their work copyright infringed on a massive level. And after these copycats started buying traffic from Google spammers the industry has never been the same. When people start obfuscating their Javascript code you know the industry has peaked. Because client-side Javascript is worth very little without solid server code.
So today template programmers do customized work instead of just wholesale.