Comments on: PHP Programming Structure http://johnmparks.com/web-development/php-programming-structure John M Parks Photography, Web Design, Poetry, Writing, Art, and Programming Tue, 06 Jan 2009 04:04:10 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.5-RC1 By: Russ http://johnmparks.com/web-development/php-programming-structure#comment-9 Russ Sun, 09 Mar 2008 20:15:18 +0000 http://johnmparks.com/web-development/php-programming-structure#comment-9 More like "Programming Structure." IANAPD but the only thing I can come up with that would make PHP development fundamentally different than, say, C++, C, Java, Python, C# or any other language that I do code in is the issue of server performance. If you're really, _really_ hurting for server resources, I could see that it would be possible that you not want to require the server to fetch and parse 10 different .inc.php files per request. But it also seems likely to me that developer time and energy is more valuable than a little extra (possibly negligible) web server strain. But if you really look at it, the same thing goes for traditional software development - even though technically the CPU has to set up a stack frame for every function/method call does not mean it's a bad idea to separate discreet chunks of code into functions/methods for the purposes of readability and maintainability. Nobody wants to read a 3,000 line main() function. Ever. tl;dr : You're right, and this applies beyond PHP. More like “Programming Structure.”
IANAPD but the only thing I can come up with that would make PHP development fundamentally different than, say, C++, C, Java, Python, C# or any other language that I do code in is the issue of server performance. If you’re really, _really_ hurting for server resources, I could see that it would be possible that you not want to require the server to fetch and parse 10 different .inc.php files per request. But it also seems likely to me that developer time and energy is more valuable than a little extra (possibly negligible) web server strain.
But if you really look at it, the same thing goes for traditional software development - even though technically the CPU has to set up a stack frame for every function/method call does not mean it’s a bad idea to separate discreet chunks of code into functions/methods for the purposes of readability and maintainability. Nobody wants to read a 3,000 line main() function. Ever.

tl;dr : You’re right, and this applies beyond PHP.

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