It has taken me a while to come around to the position that using code such as that in the title (or similar) is really cargo-cult programming. Given that seems to be the case, then I was somewhat dismayed to see that Moo automatically includes such when it generates a constructor.

I initially got around this by using before new to detect the presence of a ref instead of a string and issuing an appropriate croak message. (tip of the hat to the folks on #moose for that!)

However, several others on #moose, notably some of the authors of Moo, said that was not a wise practice, and indeed, I found that the code was position dependent in relation to where BUILDARGS is defined. Specifically, the code for before new must come after BUILDARGS is defined or else the return value from that gets blown away.

After asking a couple of questions, and getting the expected response of "Well, write it yourself!" I decided to do just that. I have a working patch to Moo that disables the code in question, replacing it with an exception.

My question at this point is this: Is the ability to force a constructor to be a "class only" method a viable feature to have in Moo (and be extension, Moose)?

The solution I arrived at after reading the code for Moo and a few other MooX modules led me to use an option passed into Moo's import method. This was mainly due to the fact that other than a significant refactoring of Method::Generate::Constructor it does not seem feasible to alter the code being generated.

While I am waiting for a review of my proposed patch, I'd like to hear the thoughts of my fellow monks if this is a desirable option to have.