The one thing I dislike about how a lot of php code is written is the way that requires are used as function calls (but without any declaration of what variable

The one thing I dislike about how a lot of php code is written is the way that requires are used as function calls (but without any declaration of what variables the required code is expecting to find). Oddly, Rails partials work this way too. They can see the controller's instance variables and are often written without any sort of defined interface, which makes for confusing, brittle code. Fortunately Rails offers the option to pass in :locals (just as php offers the option of simply using functions instead of require).