In most object-oriented programming languages writing accessor functions for internal properties is a dull and error-prone exercise. This is not the case with Perl if the modules Class::Accessor or Class::Accessor::Grouped are used.

In April I posted a lengthy post on learner support in Moodle. Today, when I revisit this article I feel so stupid, because I forgot about it while being so focused on thinking about writing the actual article. However, more important is that Steinn has released the long awaited first version of our Moodle indicator block in the meantime.

Object oriented programming has become much easier with the recent versions of Perl. One of the strangest things in the "old" days of PerlOO was the @ISA array. This array listed the modules of which a module inherits its functions. However, in order to make really use of an inherited function, one had to load the related package as well. All this looked a bit clumsy and used to confused people who started programming Perl. As I said, things have changed: now there are the base and parent modules coming with Perl's core.

I was watching Matt Trout's (mst) YAPC::NA 2009 presentation on the future of DBIx::Class to get my head around the conceptual ideas behind this nice database abstraction class that did not do the trick I wanted it to do. Well, this presentation was pretty enlightening besides the conceptual models underlying this programming framework. And since I work on my research statements for my dissertation, I picked mst's quote and made it a title for this article.