Re:Why OO Sucks by Joe Armstrong (2000)
by reallydude on Monday April 22, 2019 @02:53PM
(#19721681)
> Internal state should be kept internal.
I'm not sure that's a proven model. It's a proposed model, for sure. Since you can't protect memory from runtime access, you can't really protect state, so it's a matter of convention which Python cleverly baked in (_privatevar access).
Re:Why OO Sucks by Joe Armstrong (2000)
by DonaldPShimoda on Monday April 22, 2019 @06:17PM
(#19723551)
Ah sorry, I was speaking in the context of Kay's OOP! In retrospect my phrasing made it seem like I was stating an opinion as fact, but what I meant was just that Kay's OOP mandated that internal state could not be exposed and was very opinionated on the matter.
Actually, true OOP languages do prevent this. Internal state is completely private and cannot be exposed externally. The only way to interact with an object's state is through its methods — which means the object itself is responsible for knowing how to manipulate its internal state.
Languages like Java are not "true" OOP in this sense, because they provide the programmer with mechanisms to allow external access to internal state.
Internal state should be kept internal. You shouldn't have a class `Foo` with a private internal `.bar` field and then provide public `Foo.getBar()` and `Foo.setBar()` methods, because you may as well just have made the `.bar` field public in that case.
Also, FWIW, I did not downvote you. I dunno why you were downvoted. Seems you had a legitimate point here, even if I disagree with it.