I don't understand. Is this seriously a big deal, as in this-might-impact-Facebook-somehow big deal? At first I thought "Okay, home page source code leaked. So what? It's a little ugly, but whatever".. Now I'm not so sure. Everyone's taking this and running with it. Maybe this just happens when you're the underdog.

I guess my real question is, who cares, and why? Not antagonistic, just honestly curious.

you are right. nobody _should_ care. but anything involving facebook is news. pointless sensationalization.

BTW, that sourcecode is totally useless. It's just a bunch of includes.

Clearly they should have implemented an object oriented relational database mapping includer mechanism instead of using simple include statements. Just ask anyone.

I think his point was that it's not really very much of the functional code. It's basically the little piece that pulls in whatever's appropriate for each page. The libraries might have 50k LOC while the individual pages are a few dozen lines.

I was commenting about certain people saying that Facebook code is ugly and procedural and that they should have implemented object oriented naming conventions, or whatever else silliness they think needs to be done. Not trying to be mean to my friend nickb over there :)

I think I'm one of those people. So, why shouldn't they?

Mm.. Let's just agree to disagree. Going down this comment path would just incite something pointless.

Heh, point taken :)

This is great. What a neat insight into a popular and functional Web 2.0 site.. Does create some security & privacy issues though ... maybe for a site with this amount of private (and valuable) data there should be mandatory security process in place.

facebook > facebook source code

see? if your code does something useful, it doesn't matter how poorly factored it is, or if you use a language where > 40% of the community are total retards.

More like, the more powerful network effects you have, the less technology matters. Example: eBay.

that too, but what i was trying to get at was "code beauty fetishism" that you often find among, e.g, ruby users.

beautiful code doesn't matter.

Beautiful code has worked for me. In fact, you're using it to make this point.

One reason beautiful code works is that beautiful code roughly equals concise code, and concise code is easier to modify and easier to see bugs in.

Not sure why this guy's getting modded down, because he's right. If "matters" is defined as startup success, then code beauty matters nil. If it's defined as "get people to use your programming language without corporate influence", than it matters a great deal.