Re: What's wrong the __autoload()?

On 12 Mar 2008, at 17:31, Wolf wrote:

---- Richard Heyes <richardh@phpguru.org> wrote:

Greg Donald wrote:

You're gonna restrict the entire development team from using a given feature just because you don't want to invest 20 minutes in getting your newbie developer up to spead? That's pure idiocy.

No it's not. It's not like require_once() is a hassle to type/use anyhow. Things like editor macros and templates help out enormously and by using them over __auto load you (a business) could save yourself a lot of time and hence money.

I actually prefer to use a site prepend and append, then in the prepend file is where I throw all my requires and such. pretty much takes care of any learning curve since with the prepended file doing the heavy lifting.

But by doing so you're including a lot of code you almost certainly don't use on every page. That can pointlessly consume resources on a busy server. I use __autoload (and for new projects the SPL version) because I know that anyone who can't "get it" within 5 minutes is not someone I want to work with. Not using language features because some developers might not know about it is going to restrict you to the sort of instruction set you get in Assembler. I've been working with PHP for a very long time and I certainly don't claim to know everything about it or about every feature it has. Restrict your code in that way and you'll create a slow unmaintainable mess. IMHO. -Stut -- http://stut.net/