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Comment by Sufrostico | Hacker News Reader

IMHO most software 'service life' it's not long enough to justify the annoyance of the accessors.

Most software are outdated after a couple of years.

But I still think that accessors are a must if you know that the software will be immortal (like Internet banking applications)

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That's a pretty brutal stance. :|

I can't say I know the average shelf life of a software component in various languages, but I can say that at least things like Java have managed to justify their use of accessors by that metric. Maybe the focus should be on writing less throwaway code than deciding whether to "invest" a few extra minutes or not on accessors.

That is an understatement. I am currently working on a code which was written at 10 years back. And that code is still running on production server.

tl;dr; Usually enterprise Java applications does have long "service life".

I think most companies have tons of legacy code that is stilly lying around and in production use. When I was at Dreamworks Animation, we were still using tools written back in the 1980s to create animated features; albeit we kept improving on it whenever it didn't fit the bill.

"""Most software are outdated after a couple of years."""

You'd be surprised. Tons of code runs in production, even in the latest of shiny systems, that was written 10 and 20 and 30 years ago -- either in whole or in parts, refactored etc.

From 1986's NeXT OS that is now OS X Lion and iOS 5, to Bill Joy's TCP/IP, to Emacs.

And tons of enterprise/banking/financial/military systems use ancient code, even 70's COBOL...

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