Or just thing.age() which is fine and is fairly obvious it will return the age of the thing. And that is what is done in most languages that dont have computed properties. get_ on a method really adds no value nor clarity to things. The only reason foo() is ambiguous is because it is a bad name - really just a place holder. Missing out the brackets here adds no value either, just makes it hard to tell that you are calling a function instead of just accessing a property.