Comment by devjab | Hacker News Reader

Comment by devjab | Hacker News Reader

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> Had to explain to him public, private, internal, and also static the other night.

Access modifiers are sort of a dying breed in a lot of places aren't they? We use Go, so we're obviously still using the two it comes with, but it's public vs module only and fairly intuitive. Every other language we have in production, doesn't make use of access modifiers. Similarily while static is a thing in Python, it's hard to see what advantages it brings compared to a free function if you're using a programming language that doesn't require you to have object instances to call non-static functions. Obviously access modifiers will stick around in a lot of organisations, but there will be plenty of jobs where you never have to work with them.

The way Go handles modules, is frankly one of the few language feature of any language I've ever worked with that I wish was in every language I work with. It's so easy to use and so hard to mess up. Ok, I guess it's not hard to mess it up, but it's not intuitive.

Access modifiers are useful, albeit not for beginners. They're most useful in statically typed languages with good tooling where they keep auto-generated API docs and autocompletions clean.

Static methods are useful for namespacing, e.g.

    var instance = SomeThing.fromString("...")

In some languages you can of course make a global free function called someThingFromString which does the same thing, but then (a) it won't have access to private methods so the public API surface gets more polluted with stuff the user maybe shouldn't call themselves, and (b) it won't show up in the right place in generated API docs and (c) it won't show up in the expected place in type autocompletion.

Kotlin has both static methods (or rather companion objects which are an equivalent), and also top level free functions, and when writing it I find myself creating static methods a lot more often for the above reasons.

I probably shouldn't have worded it quite the way I did. Considering I praise Go's access modifiers. What I meant was the "old" way of having lots of them and explicitly having to write them out. I haven't tried Kotlin but it sounds nice.

What I like about Go is the simplicity. Everything inside a folder is a package/module and any method beginning with a capital letter is public while every method starting with a lowercase name is package/module only. Coming from a decade of C# it was such a nice thing.

I do work with a lot of Python where you don't have private methods. I mean, you can set up your corporate environment to "hide" _methods or whatever, but they are never turly private, and static methods are... well... they are basically just namedspaced top level functions.

Python does name-mangling of private (__foo) methods.

Python has public/protected/private as well as static/class/instance methods.

> doesn't require you to have object instances to call non-static functions

Not sure, what you mean, because you need to pass something for self?

Either:

    obj.foo (args...);

Or:

   cls.foo (obj, args...);

Not going to disagree. It's the sandbox that we're playing in though (dealing with, HOORAY JAVA!) since it's a class at school.

Have to start somewhere, teach them better alternatives as they evolve. Not even going to broach the prototype-based programing stuff until he comfortably has the basics understood.

Edit: I don't GAF about downvotes, but I would at least expect a response about why. If you don't like the philosophy, give me some reasons. Don't like something else, tell me why. I'll happily debate anyone all day long

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