Comment by mbell | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mbell | Hacker News Reader

This looks really nice.

I wish Java would do something about getters and setters. It's very awkward that they are not incorporated into the language but so many libraries assume they exist that it's a defacto requirement to generate the same boilerplate constantly. I wish the language itself would provide default 'simple' getters/setters the way Groovy does and incorporate them throughout so I could use e.g.

    .set(Person::firstName)  //Reference a default setter method for the firstName member if one isn't explicitly defined

instead of

    .set(Person::setFirstName)

As a C# developer I urge caution. When getters and setters become as trivial as

public int Age { get; set; }

Code becomes less OO and more procedural filled with anaemic models / bags of state. Practices like Tell don't Ask, Information Hiding and Rich Models, slip away.

Very very valid points, in my experience.

Accessor messages in Smalltalk, a pure Object-Oriented Programming environment, have been that trivial for a long time. See: http://www.jmcsweeney.co.uk/computing/m206/accessors.php

The issue, as I see it, isn't the ease of creating accessors; the issue is that students do not seem to learn about the practices you've mentioned.

I demonstrate "Tell, Don't Ask", "Information Hiding", and "Encapsulation" in the following presentation:

http://whitemagicsoftware.com/encapsulation.pdf

> Code becomes less OO

Frankly...good. If there is one thing Java desperately needs, it's less OO code.

You might find Project Lombok [1] interesting. It's a library of annotations that can be used to generate boilerplate code.

[1] http://projectlombok.org/

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