use Perl

Update: Has anyone else been getting a lot of "can't connect" or similar errors. Lately I've been getting them constantly here, regardless of whether I'm posting from home or work.

I'd love to have a proper IDE. So tell me, how I figure out all of the method names in a class? Well, many are built up in BEGIN blocks:

BEGIN {
    no strict 'refs';
    foreach my $token (qw( plan comment test bailout version unknown yaml )) {
        my $method = "is_$token";
        *$method = sub { return $token eq shift->type };
    }
}

Or at runtime:

package Employee;
use base qw(Class::Accessor);
Employee->mk_accessors(qw(name role salary));

... via Moose:

package Point;
use Moose;

has 'x' => (is => 'rw', isa => 'Int');
has 'y' => (is => 'rw', isa => 'Int');

... maybe Spiffy:

package Keen;
use Spiffy -Base;
field 'mirth';
const mood => ':-)';

sub happy {
    if ($self->mood eq ':-(') {
        $self->mirth(-1);
        print "Cheer up!";
    }
    super;
}

Or via AUTOLOAD, defined in XS files, etc.

So how do I figure out those methods short of running the code? I can't. Hell, even if I could, this could easily trip me up:

package Foo;
use HTML::Entities 'encode_entities';

# later
if ( Foo->can('encode_entities') ) { ... } # danger!

I could check to see if the method was defined in the class hierarchy:

use Sub::Information;
if ( $class->isa( inspect( $class->can($method) )->package ) ) { ... }

But that's a pain and breaks in all sorts of annoying scenarios. But maybe it really does mean that this is the method I want? Well, it can't tell me that.

if ( $object->can('name') ) {
    $object->name($new_name);
}

Well, does that really take an argument, instead of &get_name? And is is really a void method?

These things are frustrating to me because what I would really love to do with Bermuda is include deserialization. I'm not sure how to do that. Perl is too random and has no real introspective capabilities. Perl 6 solves a lot of this, but I'm writing Perl 5. Moose might help, but having a generic serialization tool and a custom deserialization tool? That's no good (though I wouldn't mind custom tools to be built on a generic system).

If I want deserialization, I'll have to figure out how to add that to the Bermuda "islands".

Of course, this problem is wider than just Perl. Even being able to deterministically list all methods and know which ones are actually for "fields" (or slots, or properties, or whatever your term of choice is), doesn't tell me much about the intent of those methods. This, I think, is THE big hurdle that programming needs to solve. Behavior is in the code and intent is in our heads.