and globals. mutable globals everywhere. (at least last time i ran away from it ...

oblio · on June 7, 2019

Why don't they fix it? It's long lived, it's popular, they have to maintain it.

Yes, there's backwards compatibility to maintain, but surely some of it can be contained, maybe with shims, like Windows does it.

stickfigure · on June 7, 2019

Why don't they fix it?

In all likelihood, because the people maintaining Wordpress are the people who created it in the first place, and they don't know any better.

Why did PHP apps suffer from SQL injection attacks, long after PHP supported prepared statements? Why do Java apps often have ridiculous classes like AbstractSingletonThingFactoryFactory? Why does the Javascript community (still) promulgate useless leftpad-like packages? Why do Ruby apps often end up so heavily metaprogrammed that you can't trust any line of code to do what it says?

Cultures are hard to change. The people that are turned off by Wordpress' programming style probably pick other projects and other communities. Lots of the folks working on Wordpress probably cut their teeth in that codebase. They might not like it and they might realize there are better ways, but there probably isn't a critical mass of them that share a vision out of the morass.

Personally, I took one brief look under the covers of Wordpress and immediately decided to avoid it.

agumonkey · on June 7, 2019

Maybe a 'if it aint broke dont fix it' paired with 'lets make this new feature instead'.

hanniabu · on June 7, 2019

There's such a thing as taking the backwards compatibility meme too far though. You can't keep catering to those that drag their feet. Release an update and say that the legacy will no longer be supported a year from now.