"Why is that?"
Good question. I wasn't sure myself. I seem to recall RJBS saying that initializers were his first ever contribution to Moose, but that he regretted ever adding them.
The best reasons I could come up with were:
It leads to inconsistent behaviour when an attribute value is set via the constructor versus a writer method. (Of course, this isn't an issue for read-only attributes.)
Initializers can't be inlined whereas type coercions can be partly compiled into a more efficient form, and have potential for improvement.
Having asked in #moose, I've had the following additional suggestions:
The initializer isn't called until after type constraints have been checked, so initializers don't work for one of the main use cases you'd expect them to be useful for: to munge values to conform to their type constraints.
(I'll add to this list when I receive more responses from IRC.)
In reply to Re^4: Moose and default values
by tobyink
in thread Moose and default values
by morgon
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