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Comment by twic | Hacker News Reader

Also Java's Spring Data:

https://docs.spring.io/spring-data/commons/docs/current/refe...

Wasn't it an ActiveRecord thing to begin with? Spring got a lot of its more recent awful features by trying to copy Rails.

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And somewhat ironically Rails deprecated the particularly magical features like `find_by_name("Bob")` aliases in favour of saner variants like `find_by(name: "Bob")`.

What a great change.

It always seemed ridiculous to put the lookup key and lookup value in two different places.

Nice to see Rails reconsider these things I once thought it would never surrender.

Ruby didn't have keyword arguments when they came up with the initial approach.

That's not why they did it.

For example, they could've used maps:

    find_by name: "foo"

Also the Grails ORM, but that's probably taken from Rails as well. I actually really liked it back when I was using it. Is there a good argument why automated function synthesis is a bad thing? Not trying to argue, just curious.

It's not type safe, so if you change a property name it's not going to be picked up at compile time, so you'd better have tests in place for every synthesised function. (Of course, most implementations are made in dynamically typed host languages, which have this problem with every line of code.)

It's also just a limited DSL that has none of the capabilities of the host language, and can't be used to express e.g. complex queries.

Yeah in general this approach is based on ActiveRecord from Ruby On Rails.

But in Ruby it's based on method_missing not a proxy. I believe ruby got it's method_missing idea from Smalltalk. But there might be other precursors.

Perl for one: http://perldoc.perl.org/perlsub.html#Autoloading

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