Comments on: Not everything has to be public

By: New Age/Misconceptioned Private methods « Something on Everything

New Age/Misconceptioned Private methods « Something on Everything — Sun, 24 Aug 2008 04:19:18 +0000

[...] Crawling around CakePHP’s source, you’ll find some private methods on Model. Model::_find{type} methods are just for api concistency purposes and to centralize default operations on find options – so you don’t have to call a __setupFind() before each custom find method you write, so it is a case where a private method is really needed, because calling those _find{types} methods would have no usage, as all they do is a query setup and it’s results manipulation. And it is just one example – here’s another: http://cakebaker.42dh.com/2008/07/08/not-everything-has-to-be-public/ [...]

By: cakebaker

cakebaker — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 14:22:34 +0000

@Peter, Shihan: Thanks for your comments!

@Peter: Imho it is good to have such articles from time to time, they force you to think about what you do and why you do it. But yes, I was also a bit surprised to read such an article on the Debuggable blog ;-)

By: M N Islam Shihan

M N Islam Shihan — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 23:43:04 +0000

Hi Deniel,

Your idea is almost identical to me. I’ve submitted my comments on Felix’s post and hence not repeating same here. You may have a look at that post at http://debuggable.com/posts/programming-psychology-ii-private-methods:481ed862-b0d8-4a0e-9247-165c4834cda3#comment-4877e9aa-cf90-4cb1-954b-361e4834cda3

You might get more ideas there on this funky false topic.

Regards,
Shihan

By: Peter Butler

Peter Butler — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 14:45:24 +0000

I am absolutely with you on this one, and as far as I’m concerned, making proper use of public/private and protected methods goes right up there with correctly commenting code, oop evolved to ensure better encapsulation and code re-use for a reason, just as application frameworks such as CakePHP have evolved for much the same reason, by following standards, and conventions, everything becomes much easier to work with, we stop reinventing the wheel, all become more productive and take things forward.

I am a huge fan of debuggable, but this time I think they are way off the mark.

By: This week in Cake (part 4) | Personal weblog of Robert Beekman

This week in Cake (part 4) | Personal weblog of Robert Beekman — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 10:10:27 +0000

[...] methods. Debuggable begins by writing a post about not using them and Cakebaker responds with a number of arguments and an example that you do need to use [...]

By: Sander

Sander — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 08:05:48 +0000

Hear ye, hear ye!

By: cakebaker

cakebaker — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 14:45:11 +0000

@Frédéric: Thanks for your comment! And yes, interfaces are a powerful concept to make software more flexible.

@Matt: Thanks for the hint, I changed it in the article. It seems “coke automate” is Swiss English ;-)

By: Matt Huggins

Matt Huggins — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 06:37:26 +0000

Definitely took me a few minutes to figure out what “coke automate” meant! If anyone else is wondering, it means Coke machine. :P

By: Frédéric Wenzel

Frédéric Wenzel — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 23:03:27 +0000

In addition to not wanting other people to access something, having defined public interfaces will ensure that even a year or two down the road you still won’t rely on dependencies you didn’t think about when writing your object in the first place. You can then replace it with something better, without worrying if somewhere in your project you may have used that method you always thought was not meant to be used by the outside world.

Defining and using clean interfaces is one of the major points dividing hobby hackers from professional software engineers.

By: cakebaker

cakebaker — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 17:16:16 +0000

@Adam, polerin: Thanks for your comments!

@Adam: Yes, if the requirements are different, you have to build a different machine.

@polerin: Yes, encapsulation and re-usability are important benefits of having private/protected methods.