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It’s interesting to consider the “magic” criticism in the context of languages like Zig, where devs actively want no hidden control flow. And Properties beyond

It’s interesting to consider the “magic” criticism in the context of languages like Zig, where devs actively want no hidden control flow. And Properties beyond simple { get; set; } are definitely hidden control flow. But as you said — it’s been there in C# for a while and imho it’s a good abstraction over getters and setters. Even 2005-era IDEs could manage it fine, making it easy to access the property’s get/set code, so that it wasn’t really magical. Maybe it’s a culture thing — most C# devs use IDEs. Not sure what PHP devs use, but I suspect tools like PhpStorm will make this easy to work with somehow. Devs using no-LSP editors will likely have a different view.

amerkhalid 2y ago
> Maybe it’s a culture thing — most C# devs use IDEs. Not sure what PHP devs use, but I suspect tools like PhpStorm will make this easy to work with somehow. Devs using no-LSP editors will likely have a different view. This is probably one of the big factors. I am also not a huge fan of “magic” even though I use IDE (vscode). I started off as a PHP dev, directly editing files on production server using vi. Any “magic” simply slowed me down. Years later, now I can simply cmd+click to anywhere in code but it feels a bit off to me. Perhaps, I still miss my old days of dev.
- hakfoo 2y ago
  At my first job, I largely used Notepad++ and grep, and the result tended away from object-oriented code and code paths tended to be not much more than `require_once("common.php");` The second job introduced PHPStorm, and a single page load can bounce through dozens of files and classes; it would probably be untenable without modern tooling.
neonsunset 2y ago
How do you expect properties to interact with IDEs? The argument that C# choosing to offer features that lead to terser implementation seems orthogonal to where you write it. Behavior in property getters and setters may as well be completely hidden from the caller. But the standard expectation is that accessing and/or setting a property should be cheap and not involve much logic, which most of the code out there adheres to. (and personally I'm finding it to be a more productive experience than any dynamically typed language which always feels like stone age regardless of the environment)
- lmm 2y ago
  > How do you expect properties to interact with IDEs? An IDE can highlight non-basic properties in a different colour from basic properties, or underline them or something. That would be difficult for an editor to do as part of normal syntax highlighting.
  - rwmj 2y ago
    This is also a problem when reviewing changes through github-like workflows, and even more with patch-based workflows. It's probably either impossible or very difficult to fix that ever.

amerkhalid 2y ago

> Maybe it’s a culture thing — most C# devs use IDEs. Not sure what PHP devs use, but I suspect tools like PhpStorm will make this easy to work with somehow. Devs using no-LSP editors will likely have a different view. This is probably one of the big factors. I am also not a huge fan of “magic” even though I use IDE (vscode). I started off as a PHP dev, directly editing files on production server using vi. Any “magic” simply slowed me down. Years later, now I can simply cmd+click to anywhere in code but it feels a bit off to me. Perhaps, I still miss my old days of dev.

hakfoo 2y ago
At my first job, I largely used Notepad++ and grep, and the result tended away from object-oriented code and code paths tended to be not much more than `require_once("common.php");` The second job introduced PHPStorm, and a single page load can bounce through dozens of files and classes; it would probably be untenable without modern tooling.

neonsunset 2y ago

How do you expect properties to interact with IDEs? The argument that C# choosing to offer features that lead to terser implementation seems orthogonal to where you write it. Behavior in property getters and setters may as well be completely hidden from the caller. But the standard expectation is that accessing and/or setting a property should be cheap and not involve much logic, which most of the code out there adheres to. (and personally I'm finding it to be a more productive experience than any dynamically typed language which always feels like stone age regardless of the environment)

lmm 2y ago
> How do you expect properties to interact with IDEs? An IDE can highlight non-basic properties in a different colour from basic properties, or underline them or something. That would be difficult for an editor to do as part of normal syntax highlighting.
- rwmj 2y ago
  This is also a problem when reviewing changes through github-like workflows, and even more with patch-based workflows. It's probably either impossible or very difficult to fix that ever.