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Comment by jayd16 | Hacker News Reader

WRT renaming, I find that refactoring code is often such an oversight from language designers. I consider C# to be an elegant language in this way. Public fields and properties look the same in C# so you can effortlessly refactor between them, for example. I wish more languages thought about this stuff.

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A design introduced by Eiffel, copied by Delphi, before Anders went to Microsoft designed J++ and then C#, with the said feature.

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.

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.

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...

> 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

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.

For both C# and Go I use editors that understand the language and can rename all references to a variable with one keyboard shortcut. C# has at least 3-4 of these editors available, and Go has at least 2.

I realize that not everyone's preferred editor may support every language yet, but still I think the solution to this problem is probably just having the language designers provide libraries that editors can use for these refactoring features, instead of through specific capitalization conventions.

It doesn't matter when you're making the edit, it matters when you're looking at the diff and skimming through a hundred identical changes for the things that are actually different.

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