Require, Include, Once, Autoload?

I have seen a few PHP performance tips lately that have me worried. A common tip found, is something along the lines of "Don't use require_once/include_once" and also "Don't use autoload." The implications of following these tips are troublesome to say the least.

Code Stutter

In all my experience as programmer (~9 years) I have contemplated, seen and created a few coding and naming conventions. But there was one kind of convention that always struck me as odd and lately as extremely annoying.

I want LISP, but I don't want LISP

LISP basically has everything I as a developer want. But somehow I just can't bring myself to touch it with a ten-foot-pole. Maybe it's the parenthesis ridden syntax, maybe it's the functional paradigm, maybe it's its mostly academic nature. Maybe it's my preference for curly-brace languages, or my preference for object orientation. Maybe it's those weird cons data structures and the equally weird car, cdr functions. Like LISP, Haskell and Erlang scare me. They have awesome concepts, programs can be mathematically proven to be correct, support parallel computing and more. Yet it's that very mathematical nature that makes me uneasy. Math never held much fun or interest for me. It has always been a chore, a means to an end.