Re: usefulness of "data hiding"

[Adam Beneschan <adam@irvine.com>]

On Jan 15, 4:51 pm, "Russ P." <Russ.Paie...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I thought some of you here might be interested in the following debate
> I have been having on comp.lang.python with regard to the usefulness
> of "data hiding" or "enforced encapsulation."
>
> As many of you probably know, Python had no data hiding. It does not
> allow you to declare anything "private," and everything is public by
> default. (The convention is Python is to use a leading underscore to
> identify a private _object or _function.) I suggested that a "private"
> declaration could be useful if it could be implemented without
> changing the language too drastically. Now, I can understand that
> people just don't want to change the language that fundamentally, but
> many Python folks over there insist that data hiding is just plain
> useless in general. In fact, several people over there have argued
> that Python is perfectly appropriate for even the largest safety-
> critical systems.

About the only thing I can say is in response to this (I'm assuming
the following quote is not your own):

> No. It is appropriate for dummy managers hiring dummy programmers. The
> project's size and domain have nothing to do with it.

I think that for this purpose, being capable of making a mistake makes
one a dummy programmer.  And that would include me, despite the fact
that I've been programming for over 30 years.   I do appreciate
language features to help make it more difficult for me to make a
mistake, because that cuts down on the amount of time I have to spend
debugging my mistakes.  Actually, I can't imagine why anyone wouldn't
appreciate that, although I suspect it's an ego thing.

                               -- Adam