This question came up yesterday when Sandy and I presented at DC Web Women, an Introduction to PHP [slides]. I couldn’t come up with a coherent set of arguments at the time, in a way that I could explain easily. These posts do a better job, first a general programming article on the subject:
Implicit coupling — A program with many global variables often has tight couplings between some of those variables, and couplings between variables and functions. Grouping coupled items into cohesive units usually leads to better programs.
From: Global Variables Are Bad
And a PHP specific article full of excellent examples
You may have heard that globals are bad. This is often thrown around as programming gospel by people who don’t completely understand what they’re saying. These people aren’t wrong, they just don’t often program what they preach. I’ve lost track of the number of times I’ve had the “globals are bad” conversation with someone (and been in agreement) only to find their code is littered with statics and singletons. These people are confusing globals (as in the $GLOBALS array) and global state.
From: Why global state is the devil, and how to avoid using it – TomNomNom.com