Do IDEs encourage bad code?

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…

Null checks everywhere and airport security

Having just flown half way across the world from Sydney to London I’ve been thinking about how airport security is done and noticed a somewhat interesting link to the use of null checks in code.

In Sydney and Dubai airports my baggage and I were scanned only once  before I was able to get onto the plane. I wasn’t scanned again when I went to the departure gate nor when I got onto the aircraft.

Yet I often see code which has null checks peppered all over the place – in fact in some code I’ve seen there were null checks before every single call on an object. Not only does it make the code look extremely ugly, but a lot of the checks were completely pointless since there was no chance of the object being null anyway.

Imagine how annoyed we would be if they checked our baggage at every single step from entering the airport to getting on the plane! So let’s cut out unnecessary null checks!