Re:Coding Skill and the Decline of Stagnation
by hackinthebochs on Saturday January 14, 2012 @12:26PM
(#3464658)
This smells of bucking conventional wisdom simply for its own sake. Unless you have a good reason not to follow best-practices, you're a bad programmer if you don't (this doesn't always apply if you're writing a project for yourself).
Conventional wisdom is there for a reason--it was wisdom hard fought over many iterations from people who came before. Conventional wisdom has won out against many competing ideas, a survival of the fittest of sorts. You may not always fully comprehend the reasoning for a particular 'best-practices' rule, but you're foolish not to follow it for that reason.
Adding accessors is not 'premature generalization', it's just how you write well engineered code.
If you can't see how abstraction layers affect performance, go buy yourself a real education. This isn't about premature optimization, it's about not applying premature generalization.
Sometimes it immediately makes sense to add accessors. In that case I add them right away.
Sometimes there is no apparent need for accessors, so I don't add them yet. They're easy to add (you argue so vehemently yourself), why would there be a problem adding them as needed?
A blanket rule of "just add them, always" is just a crutch for mediocre developers who aren't capable or willing to actively think about what they're working on.