For me, peak-design-pattern hit right about the time I worked on two different JVM-in-Java projects (2002-ish and 2008-ish). The problem, I finally realized, is

For me, peak-design-pattern hit right about the time I worked on two different JVM-in-Java projects (2002-ish and 2008-ish). The problem, I finally realized, is that Java programmers are taught that every class is a special snowflake in need of armor and adornments. A good Java class should be honking and hollering! It should never expose a field, never have coupling with another class that couldn't be interposed upon, and should always factor commonality into a superclass. At a minimum it should have fifteen methods, repeat the same names at least 7 times each, and be JavaDoc'd to the point your eyes are bleeding. Even if it just holds three fields and does nothing at all. ESPECIALLY IF IT DOES NOTHING AT ALL. It must pretend to be important! It should be long enough that you spend most of your time scrolling. If you aren't scrolling, you aren't coding! What. A. Nightmare. It's like trying to build an internal combustion engine and every moving part has three extra degrees of freedom, in case you wanted to pull a piston out in the middle of the freeway and use it to wipe your windshield! Just in case you want to do that, a piston can also function as a wheel, a cigarette lighter, or a potted plant. And of course it has the, ahem, armor (?) to do all of that. In fact, every nut and bolt and rod and wire has extra armor on it. They aren't bolted together, they are held with miniature six-axis robot arms, just in case. And everything has plating. Thick metal plating. Bullet-proof plating. Everything indestructible. Getters and setters everywhere! Can't you see how much better they make things! The design is so much better with getters and setterrrrss! Needless to say, I don't write code like that anymore. I prefer to write in Virgil, to make my fields public and immutable, initialized in the constructor or the anonymous zone, and when I need six classes to cooperate to do a job, they do, and they don't put armor on for friends. Private applies to a file, everybody's friends there, no surprises. But I don't expect anyone to follow me or worship it. I won't claim amazing design skills. Just trying to make things work without a lot of extra work or surprises down the line.