41–50 of 154 posts
I think there is a valuable lesson to be learned from this piece of spaghetti. I can't quite formulate it from the top of my head. But it's something like: if you wanna be rich, don't waste your time being pedant - your users couldn't care less.
When I see code like this, I'm always amazed that I can actually read it and (kinda) understand what it's doing. I always expect code like Facebook's to be so finely tuned and advanced that it'd be completely uninteligable to those outside the company and not an expert in the language.
Does anyone else remember the friend graph visualization feature facebook used to have? It was an oddity, both because it seemed like a strange but useful feature, but also because it was a perl script. One time I clicked it and got the source code to the file instead of the graph. It's somewhere on one of my hard drives, but it seems wrong to leak, especially since it has database credentials hard-coded into it.
Could you perhaps censor the credentials and release it?
I think there is a valuable lesson to be learned from this piece of spaghetti. I can't quite formulate it from the top of my head. But it's something like: if you wanna be rich, don't waste your time being pedant - your users couldn't care less.
This piece of code is doing something very simple and sequential in nature: putting together the (then) Facebook front page. I'm not sure I agree it's spaghetti. Are there any complex relationships that become hard to follow because of an inadequate level of abstraction? It doesn't look that way to me. Many programming methodologies are proposed these days, but the entire "field" smells of pseudo-science. Unless stud…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This piece of code is doing something very simple and sequential in nature: putting together the (then) Facebook front page. I'm not sure I agree it's spaghetti. Are there any complex relationships that become hard to follow because of an inadequate level of abstraction? It doesn't look that way to me. Many programming methodologies are proposed these days, but the entire "field" smells of pseudo-science. Unless stud…
You make a fair point and I guess everything is relative. My post was not meant to trash the code, but rather to point out that this code shows us that the primary objective shouldn't necessarily be writing the perfect code.
When I see code like this, I'm always amazed that I can actually read it and (kinda) understand what it's doing. I always expect code like Facebook's to be so finely tuned and advanced that it'd be completely uninteligable to those outside the company and not an expert in the language.
This looks weird in search.php (line 89): if($user 0 && !is_unregistered($user)) { return $user; }
I think there is a valuable lesson to be learned from this piece of spaghetti. I can't quite formulate it from the top of my head. But it's something like: if you wanna be rich, don't waste your time being pedant - your users couldn't care less.
I'm pleasantly surprised. It's actually fairly well structured in my opinion.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
A 100MB per request is going to seriously limit scalability (or inflate hardware costs at least)
It doesn't say it's 100MB per request, just that it's raised for safety in the rare case where it's actually needed. Would you prefer serving a 500 to that user instead?
Does anyone else remember the friend graph visualization feature facebook used to have? It was an oddity, both because it seemed like a strange but useful feature, but also because it was a perl script. One time I clicked it and got the source code to the file instead of the graph. It's somewhere on one of my hard drives, but it seems wrong to leak, especially since it has database credentials hard-coded into it.
I wonder if it was based on the code Zuckerberg used for the Java friend graph he had on his homepage prior to Facebook. Could you perhaps censor the credentials and release it?
Any Facebook employees want to get me a green light? :)