3 ms·

Would "because it's conventional and most tools and developers assume them" be an acceptable answer? The reason I read is "because you might wanna change the im

Would "because it's conventional and most tools and developers assume them" be an acceptable answer? The reason I read is "because you might wanna change the implementation" but honestly it's seems very rare to need to do that

BlackFly 3y ago
Because your data structure and your API are separate things and generally speaking, the data structure should be opaque to users of that structure unless it's sole purpose is as a record for a bunch of request arguments. For those fat request structures, it ends up being a lot of noise indeed, but in any case most of those structures for most people are dealt with by deserialization and you can often skip generation of setters and getters or autogenerate them. Do you want to return a copy/clone of the inner object or just let people mutate it, destroying all of your data structure's invariants? Yes, if you change the implementation of the structure, user code will also break and it is certainly easier to do that behind a method, this is indeed rare in practice but the nuisance of migrating direct access to indirect access is bigger than the nuisance of (today's) unnecessary indirection. Since in some cases safety around invariants and future proofing will require the level of indirection, it is easier to just expect the convention. Moreover, codegen can just produce them for you, they can be excluded from test coverage. Then there are languages like python that allow you in the future to pretend that indirect access is direct access and cannot protect invariants in any case, so just go direct from day one.
- drowsspa 3y ago
  Yeah, that's the textbook explanation, I guess. So I'll stick to it in interviews, as useless it is in real life. All the hoops for this... Codegen, excluding from coverage, Lombok, and all that magic to hide you from a simple obj.field that is all you're doing in 99.9% of cases. It's just so rare in practice. I think the language itself should allow for readonly fields and property setters for the extremely rare occasions where you need this.

BlackFly 3y ago

Because your data structure and your API are separate things and generally speaking, the data structure should be opaque to users of that structure unless it's sole purpose is as a record for a bunch of request arguments. For those fat request structures, it ends up being a lot of noise indeed, but in any case most of those structures for most people are dealt with by deserialization and you can often skip generation of setters and getters or autogenerate them. Do you want to return a copy/clone of the inner object or just let people mutate it, destroying all of your data structure's invariants? Yes, if you change the implementation of the structure, user code will also break and it is certainly easier to do that behind a method, this is indeed rare in practice but the nuisance of migrating direct access to indirect access is bigger than the nuisance of (today's) unnecessary indirection. Since in some cases safety around invariants and future proofing will require the level of indirection, it is easier to just expect the convention. Moreover, codegen can just produce them for you, they can be excluded from test coverage. Then there are languages like python that allow you in the future to pretend that indirect access is direct access and cannot protect invariants in any case, so just go direct from day one.

drowsspa 3y ago
Yeah, that's the textbook explanation, I guess. So I'll stick to it in interviews, as useless it is in real life. All the hoops for this... Codegen, excluding from coverage, Lombok, and all that magic to hide you from a simple obj.field that is all you're doing in 99.9% of cases. It's just so rare in practice. I think the language itself should allow for readonly fields and property setters for the extremely rare occasions where you need this.