Alan Knowles has a new posting over on his blog about something that I really haeven't seen much discussion on - is __autoload evil?.

Someone asked on a few of my other posts why I refer to __autoload as evil, (well apart from making sensationlist statements to keep the blog interesting).

[...] I first saw __autoload on the Zend developers list, it's one of the methods that you looked at and thought, 'is this really a good idea?'. But ignored it, since like all features of any language - 'You dont have to use it'.. or so I thought..

Autoload basically hooks into a few places so when you would normally get a 'this class does not exist' message, autoload is called to let you try and load it, and hence avoid this message.

The refutes two of the common justifications for this function: it's better from a performance perspective, and it's more flexible.

Any comments on whether __autoload is a good or bad thing?