[Bioperl-l] Re: Automatic generation of set and get methods

[Heikki Lehvaslaiho]

Hilmar is here restateing a long standing opinion of the core group that 
autogenerating methods tends to lead into problems sooner or later in 
the life cycle of modules and that their use is therefore strongly 
discouraged.

Now that there is a movement to make everything a feature, I am really 
happy that autogeneration is not commonly used.

There is at least one case where OVERLOAD has been and is still used in 
BioPerl: Bio::Biblio objects.

    -Heikki
 

Hilmar Lapp wrote:

>>>This seems so elegant, I wonder why it's not used 
>>>
>>everywhere in BioPerl. 
>>
>>>Is there some hidden problem?
>>>
>
>My personal take on this is whether this is elegant or not is a matter of personal taste; to me for instance it's not. There is a risk of things becoming obfuscated to other programmers, but that's maybe my personal opinion only. I'm a strong proponent of explicit software APIs and code. I have to say that never in my programming life have I really experienced writing getter/setters to be the time-limiting factor. Overall design, writing the business logic, fixing the bugs, and writing the documentation take 98% of the whole time, not writing getter/setters. Writing those is quite boring, but it's not time consuming. YMMV though.
>
>
>	-hilmar
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