This is not likely to be a popular stance

Popular opinion isn't everything it's cracked up to be. Popular opinion around here also favours CGI.pm, but I have very solid reasons for disliking it.

Say you want to change your hash-based objects into "inside-out objects" down the road, for instance

If I were going to make a change that substantial, I'd probably write a new class entirely and just declare the old one deprecated in favor of the new one. I'm all for code re-use up to a point, but trying to make a fundamental structural change like that to any non-trivial module is going to mean a trainload of headaches and subtler bugs than I really want to deal with if I can help it. Besides, while I do appreciate the usefulness of lexical closures (and, in fact, my one lone module on the CPAN accepts code references as a callback mechanism), using them for encapsulation in object-oriented code is a technique I reserve for the Obfuscated Code section (e.g., see this or this).

However, I also neglected to finish explaining my original thought, i.e., that accessor methods can be a sign of poor design. This is not universally the case, but often it is better to accept named arguments when instantiating the object in the first place. Obviously you will sometimes have a value that needs to be changed later on by outside code for one reason or another, but if all of your variables have such accessors, the object basically *is*, semantically, a glorified hash. I am *particularly* leary of the "let's use AUTOLOAD to automatically generate get/set accessors for all of our variables" approach. If you are even tempted to do that, it's time to re-evaluate the entire design of the class, IMO.

In reply to Re: Class attribute get/set approach flaws? by jonadab
in thread Class attribute get/set approach flaws? by radiantmatrix

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