Comment by gindely | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gindely | Hacker News Reader

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I think before you do that, you should be careful to ask why the methods are private. Frequently, code like that exists because the private methods are reusable code that is not related to the title of this class. So the solution is first to make the private methods into public methods on separate classes.

And then the resulting classes probably meet some other rule that says "reduce trivial classes to pure functions or closures".

Generally speaking, before a person writes a private function, they should remember that it means "if you misuse it you'll break my otherwise unprotected invariants." Whenever that's not true, you shouldn't write "private". In particular, it doesn't mean "I was too lazy to structure my code correctly so I tried to hide it from the public implementation".

If the code could be extracted into generic top-level pure functions, I generally don’t unless its used in more than once in the codebase. Otherwise I find a number of contextless generic functions/classes without any idea of their use exhausting to look at eventually.

I have some functions that live in closures that are fairly generic. I’m always contemplating extracting them into a higher level. But they’re currently only used in one place, and they currently reside close to that one place, and this seems sensible.

Classes with one public function can be converted into a closure. Classes with two or more public functions can be converted to a closure that return those functions through an object. Then classes and closures become closer.

Classes, of course, offer inheritance. Yet most prefer composition over inheritance. Classes, too, offer polymorphism through typing. But dynamic languages use duck typing. In most dynamic languages where duck typing and composition are used, I find little need for traditional object orientated programming.

I frankly prefer closures, composition and duck-typing over the classes, inheritance and polymorphism through typing. The only thing missing is type checking and Golang's interfaces offer a way through that without the overhead of traditional object orientated design.

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