[troels]

""Singletons do make sense when they represent a true physical singleton - for example, you only want one piece of code drawing directly to the screen, the Window Manager, which should indeed be a singleton.""

That's a false dichotomy. Trying to understand the world as global or local data doesn't make sense; It's contextual. What may be global to you may be local to the next guy and vice versa.

What does make sense, is for a programmer to make a judgement call as to whether something could meaningfully be considered global for the particular case he's working on.

I used to like the concept of dependency injection, but I have come to find it mostly just adds noise. If you use a dynamic language anyway. I don't know about statically, compiled languages, since I don't do much work in those.

[demallien]

"That's a false dichotomy. Trying to understand the world as global or local data doesn't make sense; It's contextual. What may be global to you may be local to the next guy and vice versa."

Err, firstly I didn't present a dichotomy,false or otherwise. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dichotomy

Secondly, I have no idea what you're talking about. I'm not talking about whether data is global or local, I'm saying that when you have a single physical asset, it doesn't make sense (and sometimes is even flat out wrong) to have more than one object talking to it. You will get into a big mess if you have two NetworkManagers trying to set up the one ethernet port at the same time, as a simple example. Whether that representation is local or global is orthogonal to the problem.

[troels]

Using the labels "global" and "local" as distinct categories is the dichotomy I referred to. I see them relative values, not absolutes. You can't have something be "global" or "local" - Only "More global" or "More local". I understood that you operate with categories here - Maybe I'm mistaken?

Certainly, for a given program it may (or may not) make sense to have a restriction which prevents one type of resource to be assigned more than once. My point being that there is no need to treat this restriction as "special" somehow.

[demallien]

Yes, but I didn't use the labels "global" and "local", so why on earth are you still going on about them as though I had?