Are getter/setters really useful? [duplicate] - javascript

What's the advantage of using getters and setters - that only get and set - instead of simply using public fields for those variables?
If getters and setters are ever doing more than just the simple get/set, I can figure this one out very quickly, but I'm not 100% clear on how:
public String foo;
is any worse than:
private String foo;
public void setFoo(String foo) { this.foo = foo; }
public String getFoo() { return foo; }
Whereas the former takes a lot less boilerplate code.

There are actually many good reasons to consider using accessors rather than directly exposing fields of a class - beyond just the argument of encapsulation and making future changes easier.
Here are the some of the reasons I am aware of:
Encapsulation of behavior associated with getting or setting the property - this allows additional functionality (like validation) to be added more easily later.
Hiding the internal representation of the property while exposing a property using an alternative representation.
Insulating your public interface from change - allowing the public interface to remain constant while the implementation changes without affecting existing consumers.
Controlling the lifetime and memory management (disposal) semantics of the property - particularly important in non-managed memory environments (like C++ or Objective-C).
Providing a debugging interception point for when a property changes at runtime - debugging when and where a property changed to a particular value can be quite difficult without this in some languages.
Improved interoperability with libraries that are designed to operate against property getter/setters - Mocking, Serialization, and WPF come to mind.
Allowing inheritors to change the semantics of how the property behaves and is exposed by overriding the getter/setter methods.
Allowing the getter/setter to be passed around as lambda expressions rather than values.
Getters and setters can allow different access levels - for example the get may be public, but the set could be protected.

Because 2 weeks (months, years) from now when you realize that your setter needs to do more than just set the value, you'll also realize that the property has been used directly in 238 other classes :-)

A public field is not worse than a getter/setter pair that does nothing except returning the field and assigning to it. First, it's clear that (in most languages) there is no functional difference. Any difference must be in other factors, like maintainability or readability.
An oft-mentioned advantage of getter/setter pairs, isn't. There's this claim that you can change the implementation and your clients don't have to be recompiled. Supposedly, setters let you add functionality like validation later on and your clients don't even need to know about it. However, adding validation to a setter is a change to its preconditions, a violation of the previous contract, which was, quite simply, "you can put anything in here, and you can get that same thing later from the getter".
So, now that you broke the contract, changing every file in the codebase is something you should want to do, not avoid. If you avoid it you're making the assumption that all the code assumed the contract for those methods was different.
If that should not have been the contract, then the interface was allowing clients to put the object in invalid states. That's the exact opposite of encapsulation If that field could not really be set to anything from the start, why wasn't the validation there from the start?
This same argument applies to other supposed advantages of these pass-through getter/setter pairs: if you later decide to change the value being set, you're breaking the contract. If you override the default functionality in a derived class, in a way beyond a few harmless modifications (like logging or other non-observable behaviour), you're breaking the contract of the base class. That is a violation of the Liskov Substitutability Principle, which is seen as one of the tenets of OO.
If a class has these dumb getters and setters for every field, then it is a class that has no invariants whatsoever, no contract. Is that really object-oriented design? If all the class has is those getters and setters, it's just a dumb data holder, and dumb data holders should look like dumb data holders:
class Foo {
public:
int DaysLeft;
int ContestantNumber;
};
Adding pass-through getter/setter pairs to such a class adds no value. Other classes should provide meaningful operations, not just operations that fields already provide. That's how you can define and maintain useful invariants.
Client: "What can I do with an object of this class?"
Designer: "You can read and write several variables."
Client: "Oh... cool, I guess?"
There are reasons to use getters and setters, but if those reasons don't exist, making getter/setter pairs in the name of false encapsulation gods is not a good thing. Valid reasons to make getters or setters include the things often mentioned as the potential changes you can make later, like validation or different internal representations. Or maybe the value should be readable by clients but not writable (for example, reading the size of a dictionary), so a simple getter is a nice choice. But those reasons should be there when you make the choice, and not just as a potential thing you may want later. This is an instance of YAGNI (You Ain't Gonna Need It).

Lots of people talk about the advantages of getters and setters but I want to play devil's advocate. Right now I'm debugging a very large program where the programmers decided to make everything getters and setters. That might seem nice, but its a reverse-engineering nightmare.
Say you're looking through hundreds of lines of code and you come across this:
person.name = "Joe";
It's a beautifully simply piece of code until you realize its a setter. Now, you follow that setter and find that it also sets person.firstName, person.lastName, person.isHuman, person.hasReallyCommonFirstName, and calls person.update(), which sends a query out to the database, etc. Oh, that's where your memory leak was occurring.
Understanding a local piece of code at first glance is an important property of good readability that getters and setters tend to break. That is why I try to avoid them when I can, and minimize what they do when I use them.

In a pure object-oriented world getters and setters is a terrible anti-pattern. Read this article: Getters/Setters. Evil. Period. In a nutshell, they encourage programmers to think about objects as of data structures, and this type of thinking is pure procedural (like in COBOL or C). In an object-oriented language there are no data structures, but only objects that expose behavior (not attributes/properties!)
You may find more about them in Section 3.5 of Elegant Objects (my book about object-oriented programming).

There are many reasons. My favorite one is when you need to change the behavior or regulate what you can set on a variable. For instance, lets say you had a setSpeed(int speed) method. But you want that you can only set a maximum speed of 100. You would do something like:
public void setSpeed(int speed) {
if ( speed > 100 ) {
this.speed = 100;
} else {
this.speed = speed;
}
}
Now what if EVERYWHERE in your code you were using the public field and then you realized you need the above requirement? Have fun hunting down every usage of the public field instead of just modifying your setter.
My 2 cents :)

One advantage of accessors and mutators is that you can perform validation.
For example, if foo was public, I could easily set it to null and then someone else could try to call a method on the object. But it's not there anymore! With a setFoo method, I could ensure that foo was never set to null.
Accessors and mutators also allow for encapsulation - if you aren't supposed to see the value once its set (perhaps it's set in the constructor and then used by methods, but never supposed to be changed), it will never been seen by anyone. But if you can allow other classes to see or change it, you can provide the proper accessor and/or mutator.

Thanks, that really clarified my thinking. Now here is (almost) 10 (almost) good reasons NOT to use getters and setters:
When you realize you need to do more than just set and get the value, you can just make the field private, which will instantly tell you where you've directly accessed it.
Any validation you perform in there can only be context free, which validation rarely is in practice.
You can change the value being set - this is an absolute nightmare when the caller passes you a value that they [shock horror] want you to store AS IS.
You can hide the internal representation - fantastic, so you're making sure that all these operations are symmetrical right?
You've insulated your public interface from changes under the sheets - if you were designing an interface and weren't sure whether direct access to something was OK, then you should have kept designing.
Some libraries expect this, but not many - reflection, serialization, mock objects all work just fine with public fields.
Inheriting this class, you can override default functionality - in other words you can REALLY confuse callers by not only hiding the implementation but making it inconsistent.
The last three I'm just leaving (N/A or D/C)...

Depends on your language. You've tagged this "object-oriented" rather than "Java", so I'd like to point out that ChssPly76's answer is language-dependent. In Python, for instance, there is no reason to use getters and setters. If you need to change the behavior, you can use a property, which wraps a getter and setter around basic attribute access. Something like this:
class Simple(object):
def _get_value(self):
return self._value -1
def _set_value(self, new_value):
self._value = new_value + 1
def _del_value(self):
self.old_values.append(self._value)
del self._value
value = property(_get_value, _set_value, _del_value)

Well i just want to add that even if sometimes they are necessary for the encapsulation and security of your variables/objects, if we want to code a real Object Oriented Program, then we need to STOP OVERUSING THE ACCESSORS, cause sometimes we depend a lot on them when is not really necessary and that makes almost the same as if we put the variables public.

EDIT: I answered this question because there are a bunch of people learning programming asking this, and most of the answers are very technically competent, but they're not as easy to understand if you're a newbie. We were all newbies, so I thought I'd try my hand at a more newbie friendly answer.
The two main ones are polymorphism, and validation. Even if it's just a stupid data structure.
Let's say we have this simple class:
public class Bottle {
public int amountOfWaterMl;
public int capacityMl;
}
A very simple class that holds how much liquid is in it, and what its capacity is (in milliliters).
What happens when I do:
Bottle bot = new Bottle();
bot.amountOfWaterMl = 1500;
bot.capacityMl = 1000;
Well, you wouldn't expect that to work, right?
You want there to be some kind of sanity check. And worse, what if I never specified the maximum capacity? Oh dear, we have a problem.
But there's another problem too. What if bottles were just one type of container? What if we had several containers, all with capacities and amounts of liquid filled? If we could just make an interface, we could let the rest of our program accept that interface, and bottles, jerrycans and all sorts of stuff would just work interchangably. Wouldn't that be better? Since interfaces demand methods, this is also a good thing.
We'd end up with something like:
public interface LiquidContainer {
public int getAmountMl();
public void setAmountMl(int amountMl);
public int getCapacityMl();
}
Great! And now we just change Bottle to this:
public class Bottle implements LiquidContainer {
private int capacityMl;
private int amountFilledMl;
public Bottle(int capacityMl, int amountFilledMl) {
this.capacityMl = capacityMl;
this.amountFilledMl = amountFilledMl;
checkNotOverFlow();
}
public int getAmountMl() {
return amountFilledMl;
}
public void setAmountMl(int amountMl) {
this.amountFilled = amountMl;
checkNotOverFlow();
}
public int getCapacityMl() {
return capacityMl;
}
private void checkNotOverFlow() {
if(amountOfWaterMl > capacityMl) {
throw new BottleOverflowException();
}
}
I'll leave the definition of the BottleOverflowException as an exercise to the reader.
Now notice how much more robust this is. We can deal with any type of container in our code now by accepting LiquidContainer instead of Bottle. And how these bottles deal with this sort of stuff can all differ. You can have bottles that write their state to disk when it changes, or bottles that save on SQL databases or GNU knows what else.
And all these can have different ways to handle various whoopsies. The Bottle just checks and if it's overflowing it throws a RuntimeException. But that might be the wrong thing to do.
(There is a useful discussion to be had about error handling, but I'm keeping it very simple here on purpose. People in comments will likely point out the flaws of this simplistic approach. ;) )
And yes, it seems like we go from a very simple idea to getting much better answers quickly.
Please note also that you can't change the capacity of a bottle. It's now set in stone. You could do this with an int by declaring it final. But if this was a list, you could empty it, add new things to it, and so on. You can't limit the access to touching the innards.
There's also the third thing that not everyone has addressed: getters and setters use method calls. That means that they look like normal methods everywhere else does. Instead of having weird specific syntax for DTOs and stuff, you have the same thing everywhere.

I know it's a bit late, but I think there are some people who are interested in performance.
I've done a little performance test. I wrote a class "NumberHolder" which, well, holds an Integer. You can either read that Integer by using the getter method
anInstance.getNumber() or by directly accessing the number by using anInstance.number. My programm reads the number 1,000,000,000 times, via both ways. That process is repeated five times and the time is printed. I've got the following result:
Time 1: 953ms, Time 2: 741ms
Time 1: 655ms, Time 2: 743ms
Time 1: 656ms, Time 2: 634ms
Time 1: 637ms, Time 2: 629ms
Time 1: 633ms, Time 2: 625ms
(Time 1 is the direct way, Time 2 is the getter)
You see, the getter is (almost) always a bit faster. Then I tried with different numbers of cycles. Instead of 1 million, I used 10 million and 0.1 million.
The results:
10 million cycles:
Time 1: 6382ms, Time 2: 6351ms
Time 1: 6363ms, Time 2: 6351ms
Time 1: 6350ms, Time 2: 6363ms
Time 1: 6353ms, Time 2: 6357ms
Time 1: 6348ms, Time 2: 6354ms
With 10 million cycles, the times are almost the same.
Here are 100 thousand (0.1 million) cycles:
Time 1: 77ms, Time 2: 73ms
Time 1: 94ms, Time 2: 65ms
Time 1: 67ms, Time 2: 63ms
Time 1: 65ms, Time 2: 65ms
Time 1: 66ms, Time 2: 63ms
Also with different amounts of cycles, the getter is a little bit faster than the regular way. I hope this helped you.

Don't use getters setters unless needed for your current delivery I.e. Don't think too much about what would happen in the future, if any thing to be changed its a change request in most of the production applications, systems.
Think simple, easy, add complexity when needed.
I would not take advantage of ignorance of business owners of deep technical know how just because I think it's correct or I like the approach.
I have massive system written without getters setters only with access modifiers and some methods to validate n perform biz logic. If you absolutely needed the. Use anything.

We use getters and setters:
for reusability
to perform validation in later stages of programming
Getter and setter methods are public interfaces to access private class members.
Encapsulation mantra
The encapsulation mantra is to make fields private and methods public.
Getter Methods: We can get access to private variables.
Setter Methods: We can modify private fields.
Even though the getter and setter methods do not add new functionality, we can change our mind come back later to make that method
better;
safer; and
faster.
Anywhere a value can be used, a method that returns that value can be added. Instead of:
int x = 1000 - 500
use
int x = 1000 - class_name.getValue();
In layman's terms
Suppose we need to store the details of this Person. This Person has the fields name, age and sex. Doing this involves creating methods for name, age and sex. Now if we need create another person, it becomes necessary to create the methods for name, age, sex all over again.
Instead of doing this, we can create a bean class(Person) with getter and setter methods. So tomorrow we can just create objects of this Bean class(Person class) whenever we need to add a new person (see the figure). Thus we are reusing the fields and methods of bean class, which is much better.

I spent quite a while thinking this over for the Java case, and I believe the real reasons are:
Code to the interface, not the implementation
Interfaces only specify methods, not fields
In other words, the only way you can specify a field in an interface is by providing a method for writing a new value and a method for reading the current value.
Those methods are the infamous getter and setter....

It can be useful for lazy-loading. Say the object in question is stored in a database, and you don't want to go get it unless you need it. If the object is retrieved by a getter, then the internal object can be null until somebody asks for it, then you can go get it on the first call to the getter.
I had a base page class in a project that was handed to me that was loading some data from a couple different web service calls, but the data in those web service calls wasn't always used in all child pages. Web services, for all of the benefits, pioneer new definitions of "slow", so you don't want to make a web service call if you don't have to.
I moved from public fields to getters, and now the getters check the cache, and if it's not there call the web service. So with a little wrapping, a lot of web service calls were prevented.
So the getter saves me from trying to figure out, on each child page, what I will need. If I need it, I call the getter, and it goes to find it for me if I don't already have it.
protected YourType _yourName = null;
public YourType YourName{
get
{
if (_yourName == null)
{
_yourName = new YourType();
return _yourName;
}
}
}

One aspect I missed in the answers so far, the access specification:
for members you have only one access specification for both setting and getting
for setters and getters you can fine tune it and define it separately

In languages which don't support "properties" (C++, Java) or require recompilation of clients when changing fields to properties (C#), using get/set methods is easier to modify. For example, adding validation logic to a setFoo method will not require changing the public interface of a class.
In languages which support "real" properties (Python, Ruby, maybe Smalltalk?) there is no point to get/set methods.

One of the basic principals of OO design: Encapsulation!
It gives you many benefits, one of which being that you can change the implementation of the getter/setter behind the scenes but any consumer of that value will continue to work as long as the data type remains the same.

You should use getters and setters when:
You're dealing with something that is conceptually an attribute, but:
Your language doesn't have properties (or some similar mechanism, like Tcl's variable traces), or
Your language's property support isn't sufficient for this use case, or
Your language's (or sometimes your framework's) idiomatic conventions encourage getters or setters for this use case.
So this is very rarely a general OO question; it's a language-specific question, with different answers for different languages (and different use cases).
From an OO theory point of view, getters and setters are useless. The interface of your class is what it does, not what its state is. (If not, you've written the wrong class.) In very simple cases, where what a class does is just, e.g., represent a point in rectangular coordinates,* the attributes are part of the interface; getters and setters just cloud that. But in anything but very simple cases, neither the attributes nor getters and setters are part of the interface.
Put another way: If you believe that consumers of your class shouldn't even know that you have a spam attribute, much less be able to change it willy-nilly, then giving them a set_spam method is the last thing you want to do.
* Even for that simple class, you may not necessarily want to allow setting the x and y values. If this is really a class, shouldn't it have methods like translate, rotate, etc.? If it's only a class because your language doesn't have records/structs/named tuples, then this isn't really a question of OO…
But nobody is ever doing general OO design. They're doing design, and implementation, in a specific language. And in some languages, getters and setters are far from useless.
If your language doesn't have properties, then the only way to represent something that's conceptually an attribute, but is actually computed, or validated, etc., is through getters and setters.
Even if your language does have properties, there may be cases where they're insufficient or inappropriate. For example, if you want to allow subclasses to control the semantics of an attribute, in languages without dynamic access, a subclass can't substitute a computed property for an attribute.
As for the "what if I want to change my implementation later?" question (which is repeated multiple times in different wording in both the OP's question and the accepted answer): If it really is a pure implementation change, and you started with an attribute, you can change it to a property without affecting the interface. Unless, of course, your language doesn't support that. So this is really just the same case again.
Also, it's important to follow the idioms of the language (or framework) you're using. If you write beautiful Ruby-style code in C#, any experienced C# developer other than you is going to have trouble reading it, and that's bad. Some languages have stronger cultures around their conventions than others.—and it may not be a coincidence that Java and Python, which are on opposite ends of the spectrum for how idiomatic getters are, happen to have two of the strongest cultures.
Beyond human readers, there will be libraries and tools that expect you to follow the conventions, and make your life harder if you don't. Hooking Interface Builder widgets to anything but ObjC properties, or using certain Java mocking libraries without getters, is just making your life more difficult. If the tools are important to you, don't fight them.

From a object orientation design standpoint both alternatives can be damaging to the maintenance of the code by weakening the encapsulation of the classes. For a discussion you can look into this excellent article: http://typicalprogrammer.com/?p=23

Code evolves. private is great for when you need data member protection. Eventually all classes should be sort of "miniprograms" that have a well-defined interface that you can't just screw with the internals of.
That said, software development isn't about setting down that final version of the class as if you're pressing some cast iron statue on the first try. While you're working with it, code is more like clay. It evolves as you develop it and learn more about the problem domain you are solving. During development classes may interact with each other than they should (dependency you plan to factor out), merge together, or split apart. So I think the debate boils down to people not wanting to religiously write
int getVar() const { return var ; }
So you have:
doSomething( obj->getVar() ) ;
Instead of
doSomething( obj->var ) ;
Not only is getVar() visually noisy, it gives this illusion that gettingVar() is somehow a more complex process than it really is. How you (as the class writer) regard the sanctity of var is particularly confusing to a user of your class if it has a passthru setter -- then it looks like you're putting up these gates to "protect" something you insist is valuable, (the sanctity of var) but yet even you concede var's protection isn't worth much by the ability for anyone to just come in and set var to whatever value they want, without you even peeking at what they are doing.
So I program as follows (assuming an "agile" type approach -- ie when I write code not knowing exactly what it will be doing/don't have time or experience to plan an elaborate waterfall style interface set):
1) Start with all public members for basic objects with data and behavior. This is why in all my C++ "example" code you'll notice me using struct instead of class everywhere.
2) When an object's internal behavior for a data member becomes complex enough, (for example, it likes to keep an internal std::list in some kind of order), accessor type functions are written. Because I'm programming by myself, I don't always set the member private right away, but somewhere down the evolution of the class the member will be "promoted" to either protected or private.
3) Classes that are fully fleshed out and have strict rules about their internals (ie they know exactly what they are doing, and you are not to "fuck" (technical term) with its internals) are given the class designation, default private members, and only a select few members are allowed to be public.
I find this approach allows me to avoid sitting there and religiously writing getter/setters when a lot of data members get migrated out, shifted around, etc. during the early stages of a class's evolution.

There is a good reason to consider using accessors is there is no property inheritance. See next example:
public class TestPropertyOverride {
public static class A {
public int i = 0;
public void add() {
i++;
}
public int getI() {
return i;
}
}
public static class B extends A {
public int i = 2;
#Override
public void add() {
i = i + 2;
}
#Override
public int getI() {
return i;
}
}
public static void main(String[] args) {
A a = new B();
System.out.println(a.i);
a.add();
System.out.println(a.i);
System.out.println(a.getI());
}
}
Output:
0
0
4

Getters and setters are used to implement two of the fundamental aspects of Object Oriented Programming which are:
Abstraction
Encapsulation
Suppose we have an Employee class:
package com.highmark.productConfig.types;
public class Employee {
private String firstName;
private String middleName;
private String lastName;
public String getFirstName() {
return firstName;
}
public void setFirstName(String firstName) {
this.firstName = firstName;
}
public String getMiddleName() {
return middleName;
}
public void setMiddleName(String middleName) {
this.middleName = middleName;
}
public String getLastName() {
return lastName;
}
public void setLastName(String lastName) {
this.lastName = lastName;
}
public String getFullName(){
return this.getFirstName() + this.getMiddleName() + this.getLastName();
}
}
Here the implementation details of Full Name is hidden from the user and is not accessible directly to the user, unlike a public attribute.

There is a difference between DataStructure and Object.
Datastructure should expose its innards and not behavior.
An Object should not expose its innards but it should expose its behavior, which is also known as the Law of Demeter
Mostly DTOs are considered more of a datastructure and not Object. They should only expose their data and not behavior. Having Setter/Getter in DataStructure will expose behavior instead of data inside it. This further increases the chance of violation of Law of Demeter.
Uncle Bob in his book Clean code explained the Law of Demeter.
There is a well-known heuristic called the Law of Demeter that says a
module should not know about the innards of the objects it
manipulates. As we saw in the last section, objects hide their data
and expose operations. This means that an object should not expose its
internal structure through accessors because to do so is to expose,
rather than to hide, its internal structure.
More precisely, the Law of Demeter says that a method f of a class C
should only call the methods of these:
C
An object created by f
An object passed as an argument to f
An object held in an instance variable of C
The method should not invoke methods on objects that are returned by any of the allowed functions.
In other words, talk to friends, not to strangers.
So according this, example of LoD violation is:
final String outputDir = ctxt.getOptions().getScratchDir().getAbsolutePath();
Here, the function should call the method of its immediate friend which is ctxt here, It should not call the method of its immediate friend's friend. but this rule doesn't apply to data structure. so here if ctxt, option, scratchDir are datastructure then why to wrap their internal data with some behavior and doing a violation of LoD.
Instead, we can do something like this.
final String outputDir = ctxt.options.scratchDir.absolutePath;
This fulfills our needs and doesn't even violate LoD.
Inspired by Clean Code by Robert C. Martin(Uncle Bob)

If you don't require any validations and not even need to maintain state i.e. one property depends on another so we need to maintain the state when one is change. You can keep it simple by making field public and not using getter and setters.
I think OOPs complicates things as the program grows it becomes nightmare for developer to scale.
A simple example; we generate c++ headers from xml. The header contains simple field which does not require any validations. But still as in OOPS accessor are fashion we generates them as following.
const Filed& getfield() const
Field& getField()
void setfield(const Field& field){...}
which is very verbose and is not required. a simple
struct
{
Field field;
};
is enough and readable.
Functional programming don't have the concept of data hiding they even don't require it as they do not mutate the data.

Additionally, this is to "future-proof" your class. In particular, changing from a field to a property is an ABI break, so if you do later decide that you need more logic than just "set/get the field", then you need to break ABI, which of course creates problems for anything else already compiled against your class.

One other use (in languages that support properties) is that setters and getters can imply that an operation is non-trivial. Typically, you want to avoid doing anything that's computationally expensive in a property.

One relatively modern advantage of getters/setters is that is makes it easier to browse code in tagged (indexed) code editors. E.g. If you want to see who sets a member, you can open the call hierarchy of the setter.
On the other hand, if the member is public, the tools don't make it possible to filter read/write access to the member. So you have to trudge though all uses of the member.

Getters and setters coming from data hiding. Data Hiding means We
are hiding data from outsiders or outside person/thing cannot access
our data.This is a useful feature in OOP.
As a example:
If you create a public variable, you can access that variable and change value in anywhere(any class). But if you create as private that variable cannot see/access in any class except declared class.
public and private are access modifiers.
So how can we access that variable outside:
This is the place getters and setters coming from. You can declare variable as private then you can implement getter and setter for that variable.
Example(Java):
private String name;
public String getName(){
return this.name;
}
public void setName(String name){
this.name= name;
}
Advantage:
When anyone want to access or change/set value to balance variable, he/she must have permision.
//assume we have person1 object
//to give permission to check balance
person1.getName()
//to give permission to set balance
person1.setName()
You can set value in constructor also but when later on when you want
to update/change value, you have to implement setter method.

Related

Closures VS Classes in modern Javascript

For closures which main goal it's to create another functions, I was wondering if in modern javascript, it's better to just use classes in modern javascript.
// Closure way private counter
const countPlusOne = () => {
let count = 0;
return () =>{
count++;
console.log(count);
}
}
let demoAdd = countPlusOne();
demoAdd(); // 1
demoAdd(); // 2
demoAdd(); // 3
To be honest, I never liked the use of closures in that way (but I think they're great for things like middlewares) as are hard to read.
So, should I refactor closures like the one up, to classes? Their behavior seem more analogous to typical Objects from other languages.
// Class way private counter
class countPlusClass{
count = 0;
add(){
this.count++;
console.log(this.count)
}
}
const demo = new countPlusClass();
demo.add(); // 1
demo.add(); // 2
demo.add(); // 3
No, classes aren't always better. They're just different. I'd say the main differences are
the interface of the thing returned by the constructor/factory function. A class instance has properties and methods, and usually multiple of them, whereas a closure is simply a function that you can call - with a single functionality. The syntax to invoke them is different, the extra method name is sometimes superfluous and sometimes beneficial.
In OOP, objects are expected to have an identity and a state. In FP, functions are expected to be pure. Sure, you don't need to follow a specific paradigm, and stateless objects are fine as are impure functions (though maybe call them "procedures" then), but keep these conventions in mind when arguing about readability and maintainability.
So choose wisely. Do you (possibly in the future) need multiple methods? Do you encapsulate state? Then use a class to create objects. Do you only need a function to call? Then create a closure.
A closure has a significant advantage over a class the way you're imagining: with a class, if you use a public class field like you are, any code with access to the instance can modify its value. This is usually undesirable - scope should generally be constrained as possible and you don't want the correctness of your class to depend on consumers of the class not modifying it (whether accidentally or deliberately).
class countPlusClass{
count = 0;
add(){
this.count++;
console.log(this.count)
}
}
const demo = new countPlusClass();
demo.add(); // 1
demo.add(); // 2
// some code elsewhere in the codebase that has access to the demo instance:
demo.count = 55555;
demo.add(); // not 3...
Closures, in contrast, are completely private (barring strange, exceptional circumstances).
If you were to use a class, and you wanted to emulate the privacy of closures, make sure to use private class fields instead, so they can't be modified outside the class.
class countPlusClass{
#count = 0;
add(){
this.#count++;
console.log(this.#count)
}
}
const demo = new countPlusClass();
demo.add(); // 1
demo.add(); // 2
// some code elsewhere in the codebase that has access to the demo instance
// cannot modify the private field
demo.count = 55555;
demo.add(); // not 3...
As for which is better, a closure-based object or a class? That's up to each individual developer.
Classes are not always better. It really depends upon the circumstances. Each has their place in your programming toolset.
A class has the following advantages:
There's defined syntax in the language
You can sub-class a class to extend it
You can more easily have many properties and many methods.
Methods are automatically non-enumerable and run in strict mode.
The syntax in the code that uses a class somewhat self-describes what is happening since new countPlusClass() makes it clear you're creating an object that will then have methods and probably state. That's not as obvious with the closure you show.
For object with a lot of methods there's some space-savings benefit to the prototype that a class uses.
Developer tools will recognize an instance of a class and know how to display it, auto-complete when typing code for it, how to represent it in the debugger, how to use it in error messages, etc...
A closure has these advantages:
The data in the closure is complete private. Nobody can get to it from outside the closure.
In some circumstances, the caller may find it takes less code to use the closure since you make one function call (sometimes passing arguments) and you get back another function that then implements the one thing this is supposed to do (your mention of middleware comes to mind).
So, I'd say that if you want or need or value any of the benefits of the class, then use the class.
If you don't want or need any of the benefits of the class and the simpler interface of the closure meets your needs or if you really need the privacy of the closure, then you can choose the closure.
I'd say that for a given circumstance, one of these tools may be a better "fit" for the problem at hand.
As has been mentioned in the comments, you can also have factory functions that may be closures (retain private state in a closure) and may return an object with methods and/or properties that can even be an object created by instantiating a class. So, these concepts can all be combined too to get some of the benefits of both.

Privacy in JavaScript

Function scoping offers the only privacy in JavaScript.
So the canonical:
function Ctor(dep1, dep2) {
this._dep1 = dep1;
this._dep2 = dep2;
}
Ctor.prototype.foo = function() {
// use this._dep1/2...
}
...is problematic in that it offers no encapsulation for the injected dependencies.
An alternative (albeit slightly different in terms of location of foo) that offers real encapsulation might be:
function factory(dep1, dep2) {
return {
foo: partial(foo, dep1, dep2), // or use bind (partial could be a library fn for partial application)
};
}
function foo(dep1, dep2) {
// use dep1/2
}
But I rarely see this pattern. Is there a good reason to not use the latter?
You already state the advantages of the second pattern. The disadvantages are:
you must either group methods by visibility (even if the private method is intimately related with a public one, but barely related to other private methods), or repeat all public methods in the object literal (which doesn't work well with jsdoc).
the code introduces a separate function object for every instance of your class, which sacrifices some performance (this usually doesn't matter, but sometimes might)
unlike private modifiers in many programming languages, this encapsulation can not be circumvented, even if misapplied and I really know what I am doing (historically, JavaScript has been an environment where anything goes, and many attribute its success to this extensibility)
Simple: why?
"Privacy" is terrifically overrated. It doesn't hide anything from anyone who really wants it. Having "protected" or "private" members is purely for the programmer's benefit, specifically to indicate how a particular member is supposed to be used (this here is a public API, this here is not so please don't touch it unless you know what it does). That's all. A naming convention like starting underscores is perfectly enough to implement that. If a member name starts with an underscore, don't touch it, unless you know what you're doing.
There's no intrinsic need to bend over backwards further than that.

Coffeescript classes variable fields - keeping initialization clean

I have some elementary object classes in my program. They have both functions and data fields in them. I just realized that if I declare some default data fields values outside the construct method then they will not get reset on object = new Class params kind of initialization.
class Book extends DBNode
language: 'en'
title: ''
year: 0
# function
bookReaded: (callback)->
# db stuff
callback()
ie: in this case creating a new Book obj and then editing its title will result in the following instances being initialized with the title field already set to the value of the last instance.
class Book extends DBNode
constructor: ->
#language: 'en'
#title: ''
#year: 0
super(props, user, cb)
# function
bookReaded: (callback)->
# db stuff
callback()
Whereas in this case fields get properly reset each time and the title field will be set to blank at each initialization.
Well - you will say - obviously: they are prototypes. You will say. And I get that... now.
Anyhow, the matter is still a little bit fuzzy for me, so I wanted to ask if just declaring all variable fields in the constructor is enough to provide all cross-instance security needed or if there are some other things that should be kept in mind when dealing with prototypes instead of simple objects.
As I'm using it server side, my main concern is about the simultaneous execution of stuff that could mess up this kind of global-scope situation, and whether I should consider using only normal objects (I do make use of inheritance advantages in some functions, but nothing that cannot be achieved with a couple of extra lines of code)...
Is just declaring all variable fields in the constructor enough to provide all cross-instance security needed
It's not about security, it's about functionality. But yes, if you assign all mutable properties in the constructor then you are on the safe side (for the primitive values in your example it actually doesn't make a difference).
As I'm using it server side, my main concern is about the simultaneous execution of stuff
There is no simultaneous execution of code in JavaScript. Not even on the server side.
Should I consider using only normal objects (I do make use of inheritance advantages in some functions, but nothing that cannot be achieved with a couple of extra lines of code)...
No. The point of inheritance is to save those lines of code. Also, by putting methods on the prototype you increase performance of your code.

should I use public method to access private variable inside a class?

The pseudo-code is in JavaScript. I have the class Animal and the method typeMatches that uses private variable _type that holds the type of the animal:
function Animal()
{
this._type = "dog";
}
Animal.prototype.getAnimalType = function()
{
return this._type;
}
Animal.protytype.typeMatches = function(animalType)
{
//option 1 - accessing private variable directly
return this._type === animalType;
//option 2 - accessing private through public method
return this.getAnimalType() === animalType; //accessing private through public method
}
I've always used private variables directly from inside the class (option 1), however I was told recently that it's a bad practice and I should use public methods to get private variables whenever I have a chance to do so (option 2). But I question this advice on the grounds that the variable is private and I'm using it inside the class so I'm not breaking any conventions, while the direct access makes my code clearer to me. Am I wrong?
Do it when it's absolutely needed (and avoid it whenever possible).
The only task of a getter is to return the data, perhaps after a transformation to make it more easy to use.
For example the backing field
long _ticks = 500000000000L;
Can have a getter
public long GetTicks()
{
return _ticks;
}
It is indeed correct that in this case there is no difference between using the backing field and the getter. The problem with using getters however is that you are now making both your external and your internal representation of the data the same.
We can express very easily why this is a problem: what if we want to return our _ticks as a string to the outside world? Now we have to break internal functionality or otherwise we won't be able to change something as ordinary as a public interface.
Indeed: the very thing we are trying to accomplish with the encapsulation of our private fields is now broken because you would be trying to use external representation inside the internal functionality.
This code will now break other code inside our class that relied on it being passed a numeric type instead of a string.
public string GetTicks()
{
return _ticks.ToString();
}
There are very, very little situations where I would advocate the use of a getter inside the class itself (a calculated field like #Noel's GetAge() comes to mind) and if I do it's because it's the last feasible option. Keep your internal and external representation separated, it will save you headaches.
(I'm not very familiar with Javascript but I believe the code samples are clear enough. I realize Javascript cares less about exact types but this is merely an example: there are many different kinds of transformations possible.)
As #Jeroen Vannevel pointet out it is only "essential" if some logic is behind the getting/setting.
For example if you have two properties:
1) BirthYear:
2) Age
The easiest way would be to calculate the Age when setting the BirtYear.
You could do 1 setter to set both properties and 2 getters for each property.
The reason why people recommended to you to always use getters/setters is that you would always have the same structure in your code and you would never break any functionality by changing a getter/setter. Additionally you don't have to differentiate between properties and functions while accessing them (you only got functions)
I use em' pretty much always. It is more consistent.

JavaScript: Is it worth making variables private and defining getters/setters?

I'd like to start by saying that I understand that JavaScript is a Classless language. My background is in Java, C++, and Objective-C which are all classic OOP languages that support Classes.
I'm expanding into Web Development and have been experimenting with JavaScript and learning its Patterns. Right now I'm working with the Constructor Pattern that simulates Classes with in JavaScript.
So this is my "practice" class:
function Car( model, year, miles ) {
this.model = model;
this.year = year;
this.miles = miles;
var privateVarTest = 10;
this.getPrivateVarTest = function() {
return privateVarTest;
}
this.setPrivateVarTest = function( value ) {
privateVarTest = value;
}
}
Car.prototype.toString = function() {
return this.model + " is a " + this.year + " model and has " +
this.miles + " miles.";
}
var myCar = new Car( "Ford Focus", "2006", "65,000" );
document.getElementById('notepad').innerHTML += '</br> Testing </br>';
document.getElementById('notepad').innerHTML += myCar.toString() + '</br>';
document.getElementById('notepad').innerHTML += myCar.model + '</br>';
document.getElementById('notepad').innerHTML += myCar.getPrivateVarTest() + '</br>';
myCar.setPrivateVarTest( 20 );
document.getElementById('notepad').innerHTML += myCar.getPrivateVarTest() + '</br>';
Now I like using the prototype way of defining functions, as it doesn't instantiate a new version of the function for each Car Object created. However, in classic OOP languages we make our variables private and create public functions/methods to set and get these variables as needed.
JavaScript being Classless there is no private or public key word for this use, so I thought I'd experiment with a method of "faking" a private variable, and that's when found that using var instead of this essential makes it unaccessible out side of the constructor, but I was able to define getters and setters that would allow me to.
Now finaly to my question, sorry about the long wind up. For Best Practices from experinced JavaScript programmers, would you make all variables private to follow the standards of other OOP languages, and set getters and setter (which can not be prototyped forcing a creation for each Object), or avoid them as much as possible since the this keyword basicly lets you get and set all you want, and ONLY use private for hard coding some internal data needed for the class?
Thank you for taking the time to read this and providing to the discussion, I'm really just trying to get a feel for the standards that are used as Best Practices by experinced Web Developers.
General OOP
I'm in the camp that getters and setters are largely completely pointless and silly regardless of what language you're writing code in.
For the most part, exposed properties should be rare since any property of an object should typically be within the object's domain so only the object should actually change its own internals as a side-effect of other actions, not because some other object directly told it to change something. There are exceptions I'm sure (there always are) but I can't remember the last time I needed to make one.
Furthermore, when properties are exposed, the only reason to expose with a method is because you either can't just expose the property due to language constraints (Java) or because some validation or notification has to happen when you change that property. Just tacking on methods Java-bean-style that do nothing more than actually alter or return properties does nothing to preserve encapsulation. You might as well just make the property public if you can.
But the real problem with wanting to get/set everything willy-nilly from all over the place is that you've basically just written chained procedural code and called it OOP. You still have a long winding series of things that can only be reasoned about in terms of one happening after the other. With OOP, the idea is to avoid that long winding spaghetti chain so you can view your architecture more from the perspective of larger constructs that own specific domains interacting with each other at key points. Without that, you're perhaps reducing the spaghetti a touch by at least categorizing your functions under namespaces so it's easier to know where to look for stuff but you're not really leveraging the key wins that OOP can provide your architecture.
The real value of private or in JS's case local constructor/factory-closur vars is signalling intent. If it's exposed, something external really should be changing it. If it isn't, then you've made it clear that the var is only the object's business.
JS OOP
My advice is to forget class-emulation in JS. It's completely unnecessary. Prototypes are elegant and easy once you understand them. Think of a constructor's prototype property as a kind of a backup object. If you call a method on an instance that it doesn't have, the next step is to check the instance's constructor's prototype object property. If that object doesn't have it, then its constructor's prototype object gets checked and so on until you finally reach the core Object constructor's prototype.
It's because of that lookup process that you can add new methods to a constructor on the fly and have all instances "inherit" it after they've been built but it's not really inheritance so much as a fallback process.
Inheritance in JS is stupid-easy. That doesn't mean you should do a ton of it though. Long chains of cascading inheritance is regarded as an anti-pattern in any language for good reason and due to the way the callback process works, it can also really kill perf if you're hammering on the call object through like 18 levels of prototypes for every little thing in JS. I would say prefer composite objects to inheritance and when inheritances seems like a wiser option, check yourself any time you're tempted to inherit through more than 2-3 prototype links in the chain.
Oh, and one JS gotcha to look out for on local instance vars in the constructors as private properties: that's just JS's closure rules within a function scope context in action really. Methods declared in the prototype or outside of the constructor function can't access those internal vars. Constructor functions invoked with the new keyword change the rules of what 'this' accesses and they leave an instance behind but are otherwise executed JS functions in every other way.
Other flavors of crazy but also crazy-powerful worth understanding in JS OOP are the apply, call, and now bind methods. I tend to see these more as things you'd want in a factory but they are very powerful.
Once you've mastered JS OOP, start understanding JS from a functional perspective and you'll discover it has a really powerful 1-2 punch combo going on. We can do just about anything very easily and with a minimum of code in JS. The design tradeoff is performance (which modern JIT compilers are handling surprisingly well) and that it gives you plenty of rope to hang yourself with. I prefer the rope. The self-lynching is no fun but that's part of the learning/developing better instincts process which happens much faster as a result and leads to more maintainable code in the long haul. Whereas Java basically forces OOP implementation but due to being overly protectionist in regards to devs doing dumb things to themselves, results in community wide adoption of practices that run completely counter to the whole point of OOP.
The short version:
Stop getting/setting a lot if you do, regardless of language. It drastically reduces the win factor of implementing OOP in the first place.
Prototypes are really simple, elegant, and powerful. Tinker with them. Learn them. But be warned. Classes might start to feel archaic, clumsy, and overwrought in comparison (although to be fair, completely necessary in non-interpreted languages).
To make JS work well for you, self-learn the crap out of whatever aspect of it you happen to be dealing with. The rewards in terms of raw elegant linguistic power are more than worth the time spent. JS is closer to Scheme than the languages you listed being familiar with so it's weird but it's not being weird arbitrarily or without design principles in mind and JS's dominating success in web UI is no accident, regardless of what people telling everybody we're "stuck with it" would have you believe.
Full disclosure: I don't love Java.
Update:
The es6 class keyword changes virtually nothing about OOP in JS. It's 100% syntax-sugar. IMO, the use of the word "class" isn't doing newcomers any favors but there are advantages/disadvantages to all three styles of object constructor/creation and object instantiation in JS and they're all worth knowing/understanding. Those three approaches are functions as constructors, Object.create, and now the class keyword.
We need to be aware of our tendency to want every new language we learn to behave identically to the last language we learned. Or the first. And so forth. Douglas Crockford has a great (albeit a bit dated) google talk, in which he muses, "Javascript is the only language I know of that people feel they don't need to learn before using it". That talk will answer a lot of questions you never knew you had, including the one you've asked here.
There's nothing wrong with writing setters and getters. There's rarely harm in doing work to keep one's own sanity. You will happen to have a 'C accent' when speaking JS, but at least you'll be clear in your intent to anyone reading your code.
My sanity saving tip for managing 'this' across scopes, always remember that you can save your current 'this' before entering a new context:
var self = this;
I avoid using prototype except in special cases by including my object methods within the scope of the declaration.
function MyClass(_arg){
var self = this;
this.arg = _arg;
this.returnArg = function(){
return self.arg;
}
}
var foo = new MyClass("bar");
foo.returnArg(); //"bar"
in case of OOP I have to say infact javascript provide some level of oop.
by that I mean 4 main concepts of OOP design could be implemented in javascript although it is not strong and very well defined as in Java or C++. lets check those concepts and I will try to provide an example for each of them.
1- Abstraction : here as I said before we can understand why OOP is not very well defined as in Java, in Java we implement Abstraction concept using Classes, Variables, interfaced,... but in javascript Abstraction is rather implicitly defined in contrast to other OOP languages such as Java.
2- Encapsulation : I guess an example will suffice here
function Student (stdName, stdEmail, stdAvg) {
this.name = theName;
this.email = theEmail;
this.avg = stdAvg;
}
here also as you see we define a "class" like concept using functions in fact if get type Student you'll see it is a function.
3,4 - Inheritance and Polymorphism :
the way that JavaScript achieves Inheritance and Polymorphism is different than Java or C++ because of its prototypial (to be honest I have no idea any other way to say that) approach.
const Gun = function(soundEffect){
this.soundEffect = soundEffect;
};
Gun.prototype.fire = function(){
console.log(this.soundEffect);
};
const DesertEagle = function(color,clipSize){
this.color = color;
this.clipSize = clipSize;
};
DesertEagle.prototype = new Gun("pew pew peeeew");
const myWeapon = new DesertEagle("black",15);
myWeapon.fire();
now in order to cover the public/private access for variables and functions we have to use some kind of technique to implement such concept. check the code below:
const Student = function(name, stdNumber, avg){
this.name = name;
this.stdNumber = stdNumber;
this.avg = avg;
var that = this; //NOTE : we need to store a reference to "this" in order for further calls to private members
this.publicAccess = { // a set of functions and variables that we want as public
describe: function () {
console.log(that.name + " : " + that.stdNumber);
},
avg: this.avg,
};
return this.publicAccess; // return set of public access members
};
const newStd = new Student("john", "123", "3.4");
newStd.describe();
// output: john : 123
console.log(newStd.avg)
// output: 3.4
in ES6 defining a class is mush easier but it is just syntax sugar it is still the same thing at the heart of it.
I hope it will help .
I also recommend you this article (Javascript design patterns) it will provide some helpful information about avascript capabilities and design patterns.
please accept my apology for my poor English.

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