Author: Tom (Page 97 of 427)

In the last post, I said we couldn’t afford some of the same luxuries that statically typed, compiled languages have. Specifically, I was talking about the idea of not having to deal with autoloaders.

Instead, compiled languages can take all of the files that make up the program, process them, and bundle them up into a single binary.

But to do that, it needs a specific type of a program to do that.

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In the previous post, I covered a few points as to why I think that include_once, require_once, and other similar statements result in poor development practices (at least when it comes to the work we’re doing with our WordPress projects).

If you haven’t read it, no big deal. The gist of the post is that these statements make:

1. debugging more difficult,
2. tracing code harder to do.

Ultimately, they are things we can avoid. I ended the post with the following:

This still leaves the question of why autoloading (or any inclusion of third-party files) is needed at all.

And though I’d love to cover all the details in this post, it’s going to take this and one more post as its important to understand some foundational topics on languages, interpreters, and compilers before getting too far ahead.

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One of the easiest things that we can do when working on WordPress plugins is to drop require_once or include_once statements throughout our code.

And why not? It’s an easy way to bring in all of the necessary files or dependencies for a given class, have it easily readable, and not have to worry about creating huge files of code. That is, it helps us simplify what we’re writing so that we’re able to have our classes [mostly or ideally] do what they are doing well.

If you’ve read this site for the past year or so, though, you know that I’m a fan of autoloading and it’s something that I think anyone working with PHP – regardless of if you’re using WordPress or another platform – should use.

But it raises two questions especially if you’re just starting out:

1. Why bother with autoloading when there are other ways to handle loading dependencies?
2. How does autoloading stack up against compiled languages?

So I thought it would be worth answering this in the next couple of posts.

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