[Seaside] A new critical blog discussing Seaside - Using getters/setters

[Frank Shearar]

Michael Lucas-Smith wrote:
> You don't like "political correctness" which is fine, I don't like it 
> either.. I do though think there is a thing called politeness, which 
> is how I personally try to hamstring my communications.
>
> What I'm seeing a lot of on your blog and on your posts here is your 
> personal opinion on certain engineering practices that you'retelling 
> other people to do. Do you realize that people don't like being told 
> how to think? There are many many "politically incorrect" words one 
> can apply to somebody who does that.
>
> Anyway, my minor rant about your approach to communicating with people 
> aside, on the matter of direct instance variable access, my personal 
> development style, opinion and likes/dislikes lend toward using direct 
> instance variable access wherever possible.
>
> For me, providing an accessor to a variable is like saying "this is 
> not my personal encapsulated state, it is something you can fiddle 
> with". That makes an accessor public API to me, so I won't create it 
> unless I really mean it.
<snip>

Thanks, Michael, for the post. That's exactly how this poult feels about 
instvars.

Before I get turned into KFC, I'd like to suggest that we're not 
entirely off-base re instvars and accessors, given that this might hen 
says much the same thing: 
http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/squeak-dev/2007-October/121297.html

In brief: accessors expose a class' state to all and sundry. Sometimes 
that's exactly what you want, and sometimes not.

frank