It does look nice, but that's a lot of very widely used code that's being deprecated. That's why it's being only deprecated though. Deprecation is a signal to

It does look nice, but that's a lot of very widely used code that's being deprecated. That's why it's being only deprecated though. Deprecation is a signal to the developer that things are changing. It's the step before terminating support for the code. I like these changes, personally. I think it makes the code more readable, and lazy loading should help improve performance a bit. I wish ActiveRecord would have declarative attributes à la DataMapper or MongoMapper though.