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by plorkyeran
2336 days ago
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"relatively well organized" is the problem. It's written in a fairly unstructured imperative style that's perfectly suitable for short scripts, but even these relatively small pieces of code are outgrowing it. The extensive use of global variables is an obvious thing that I would expect to become a problem soon. It's much less of a problem in php than in most other web frameworks due to the design of handling each HTTP request in a fresh process (so things like the use of $user in both index.php and search.php can't conflict), but it's still quite fragile. By the standards of 2007 PHP this is good code, and today there's probably lots of worse PHP being written (even if the community as a whole has moved on quite a bit). |
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By the standards of early 2004 (when Facebook was originally written) this is still mediocre PHP. People who cared about writing good PHP were reading magazines like this (2003):
https://www.phparch.com/magazine/2003-2/june/
and having discussions like this (2004):
https://www.sitepoint.com/community/t/to-hopefully-clear-up-...
They knew global variables and hundreds of lines of top-level code were bad PHP, they just didn't know yet that trying to ape Java wasn't good PHP. If I remember correctly, DHH came out of this period: he got so sick of enterprisey PHP that he jumped ship to Ruby and wrote Rails. That was 2005.
Fair enough that Facebook hadn't done a major rewrite by 2007, but still: not good code.