Although modern day IDEs (Eclipse, IntelliJ, Resharper etc) undoubtedly provide a lot of benefits when writing code, I am starting to wonder if the ease at which they make things possible actually encourages bad habits.

Useful features such as creating and initialising member variables from the definition of a constructor are quickly nullified by the ease at which one is able to create getters/setters/properties for these same member variables. All hopes of encapsulation gone with a few clicks of the mouse.

The counter argument is that you need to work responsibly when given a powerful tool, but it just seems to me that it’s hard enough to write good OO code (too hard maybe?) - anything which makes it harder is not a good thing!

I am convinced that IDEs need to provide an Office paper clip style Martin Fowler which pops up whenever you do something questionable (such as creating getters for every field on a class) and asks whether you really want to do what you’re doing.

Or maybe there is too much cranking out of the code and not enough thinking about the design of what we’re coding that’s the real problem…​