[sdegutis]

I liked a similar aspect of Ruby: attributes and 0-args methods had the same syntax, so you could easily refactor a static field into a method that returns a dynamically calculated value. Overall I don't like that feature, but that was a very handy aspect of it.

[ben-schaaf]

Ruby actually went one step beyond: there are no attributes. `attr_reader` just generates a 0-arg method, while `attr_writer` just generates a 1 argument `name=` method.

[masklinn]

TBF that's pretty directly inherited from the Smalltalk ancestry: just like Smalltalk, Ruby simply doesn't have public (data) fields. Although it does provide shortcuts for automatically generating accessors which I don't think Smalltalk did / does.

Funnily enough, Self opted for the opposite tack of not having private data fields (although it does have readonly and read/write slots), but you can trivially swap "data" slots and "method" slots: http://handbook.selflanguage.org/2017.1/langref.html#constru...

[scroot]

> Although it does provide shortcuts for automatically generating accessors which I don't think Smalltalk did / does.

Most Smalltalk browsers do actually offer this capability

[masklinn]

The tooling does provide that yes, as it does in e.g. Java. But Ruby does it without tooling, the feature is a runtime message to the class object.