[ben-schaaf]

I used to find this odd as well, but that feeling came from a misunderstanding of what a "property" is. When you use `attr_reader :foo` what you're actually doing is calling a method that defines a method on the class for accessing `foo`. `a.foo` is not accessing a property, it's calling a method. `a.foo = 2` is not writing to a property, it's calling a method called `foo=`. The "()" can be left out because it's never ambiguous whether you're calling a method, because you're always calling a method.

[mercer]

I remember loving this when I learned Ruby. There's a certain elegance to it.

However, I'd say for practical purposes, it still leaves me with the problem that in my day to day coding I'm left with the same ambiguity. I don't know if I'm calling a simple-assignment auto-generated method that is setting a property, or a method that does all sorts of stuff under the hood.

While I'm still fond of Ruby, I've come to prefer less ambiguity. I like to be able to see at the calling site whether what I'm doing is calling a method or setting a property, and parentheses are a great way to signal that.

As an aside, one thing I didn't like about Elixir was that it also made parentheses optional. Once I realized why this was necessary, and once the formatter was added and enforced parentheses as a default, it stopped being a problem. Still, every language I've used where they're optional have caused weird little problems that never seemed to be outweighed by the convenience (CoffeeScript comes to mind).

But all that said, it's not too high on my list of things to hate on :).

[dragonwriter]

> I like to be able to see at the calling site whether what I'm doing is calling a method or setting a property

In Ruby, as is also true in many languages that have a syntactic distinction, setting a property is always ultimately calling a method, so the distinction is illusory. What you may want is a purity guarantee (well, that getters are pure and than setters have no effects except on the state specifically backing the property, but the latter gets complicated to apply to nontrivial properties), but most languages that let you distinguish whether properties or methods are exposed in an API don't provide a that kind of guarantee with properties, either, just more boilerplate code to implement them.

And the whole point of properties over exposed data members is to abstract behavior so that implementation changes don't change APIs.

[int_19h]

Even when it's not enforced by the language, it can be something enforced as part of the coding style by the team - that Foo vs GetFoo() indicates presence of side effects, or potentially expensive computation.

[thaumasiotes]

> As an aside, one thing I didn't like about Elixir was that it also made parentheses optional.

Ocaml does something similar. If you have nested function calls in a line of code, the interior calls look just like lisp. But the outermost one omits the parentheses.

[monadic2]

The worst part is when you invoke a method like a property but it has side effects.

[scubbo]

That's a really helpful way to think about it, thank you!