[anthonyb]

Most dynamic languages use convention, which seems to work pretty well in practice. My take is that if other developers are accessing the encapsulated parts of your library, then your API or your documentation is broken - possibly both - and you should, like, fix that. Not use language features to lock them out.

[MartinCron]

One of the things that I have used access controls for is to simplify the exposed surface that collaborators work with. This isn't a condescending "I don't trust you" intention. It's more along the lines of "of all the types and methods here, you only need to know about this small subset". It's customer service, I tell ya!

And if the API isn't sufficient by not exposing enough, that's fine. It's always easier to expose something later than to make it private later.

[SoftwareMaven]

Maybe easier for you (very debatable), but never easier for the guy who needed something exposed today to get his job done.

I have never been bitten by over-promiscuous code entries in Python. The times I've gone beyond the published API, I knew I was doing it so I knew I had to keep track of it. And I've gone deep here (replacing Django's database handling in their unit testing framework).

On the other hand, I can't count how many times I've been stuck in Java figuring out how to get around somebody's final class or private method that I really needed to tweak just a little bit or, worse, I needed access to a field I can see in my debugger. Needing to reflect through to get at it is STUPID.

[MartinCron]

You may have a planes-that-crash bias there. You don't notice all the times you benefit from a well encapsulated service because it just works the right way. The rare handful of times when something that would be useful is marked private is what sticks out in your mind.

I know that I would prefer to work with an interface with 10 public classes with 50 public methods than an interface with 100 public classes with 5000 public methods.

The conceptual weight of wading through all of that stuff has a cost. There is often value in not knowing or caring about implementation details.

Although I do agree that final/sealed is generally just mean-spirited and pointless.

[SoftwareMaven]

Your argument assumes that you need language-enforced mechanisms in order to define a well-encapsulated API. That is simply not that case, as the many well designed APIs in Python, Ruby, and Lisp can attest (and many poorly designed APIs in Java as well). You can use documentation, conventions, and other mechanisms to define the publicly exposed API so one doesn't have to know the guts.

But when I need to deviate from that API, for whatever reason is important to me but not to the library designer (from a bug to a weird environmental issue specific to me), if I can't get done what I need to, the language is getting in my way instead of helping me.

[MartinCron]

I totally agree that language-enforced mechanisms aren't the only way to get meaningful encapsulation. People can (and do) write good code or bad code in any language.

I was just trying to point out that there are both benefits and drawbacks to language-enforced encapsulation and the benefits may be less obvious than than the drawbacks, which are generally more painful.

[SoftwareMaven]

You have a good point there. You generally have to think about what you are exposing if the language demands it. And I think it is great when a language guides you into doing the right thing. Guides being the operative word.

Given the choice, I'll choose consenting adults. :)

[anthonyb]

> It's always easier to expose something later than to make it private later.

...if you're using Java, since (AFAIK) you can't switch between public fields and getters/setters. Python, however, has properties: http://www.python.org/download/releases/2.2.3/descrintro/#pr... . Point 4 of http://dirtsimple.org/2004/12/python-is-not-java.html covers why they're a good idea, though you can probably figure it out from their description.

[MartinCron]

Yes, I do a lot of work in C#, which has properties that are code-compatible with public fields. The last time I did a Java project, I was surprised at how much I missed them.