rails/rails — comment on commit 85b64f98d100d37b3a232c315daa10fad37dccdc
File:  line 0
By codesnik:

@matthuhiggins ActiveModel::TypeCasting made sense in the earliest rails 2.x. Whole "before_typecast" urges to be moved out.
Don't need that column in your database, just an accessor? sorry, have to write your own conversion logic. Want to show original enetered value, not typecasted, in your form on validation error? whole new bunch of boilerplate code. Want to make date accessor with "date(1i)" kind attributes? sorry, that's AR thing. And every other storage framework just tries to mimic AR typecasting, more or less succesfully.

I've tried to approach that problem several times, but failed to abstract it well enough for general use. Maybe someone with better abstraction skills could do that.