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The summary seems to be that the original author of something chooses arbitrarily what to encapsulate, but the encapsulated parts may be useful for the user. The other reason is that the safety provided by encapsulation is not that valuable if you have static typing

Rosa Control

I disagree, I think encapsulation is more about design and intention, but that's why I also believe if we get refined or dependent types there's less need for encapsulation

What about how exposing internals details makes it hard for library maintainers to evolve things without breaking client code? This is still an issue for dependently typed languages.

Rosa Control

Yes, but the argument I have seen there is that you can easily refactor the client code to adapt to the changes made in a dependency that didn't use encapsulation. I'm not sure if I agree though

Replying to

12:31 PM · Aug 20, 2020Twitter Web App

Yeah I think I'd be worried as a maintainer, because I'd need to be constantly doing large version bumps for internal changes (which I want to be free to do), penalizing users with more work bumping dependency versions if they're not directly using internal stuff. 😅

Replying to

and

But yeah, dependencies are hard - and I do find code evolution super tricky - eg. having a single version number for an entire package, and trying to decide is a behavioral change is breaking or not… ugh.

Maybe it would be neat if you could only use internals if you were pinned to the exact version number of a library? 🤔

Replying to

and

But this is only a problem if the tooling can’t describe the impact of upgrading to the user, right? Version numbers are a very dubious way of conveying that IMO. I’d rather the package manager analysed the changes against my code and told me: nothing should break/this will break

Yeah, definitely agree on that twitter.com/brendanzab/sta - kind of was working off the assumption of semver (which is what I normally deal with), but yeah, very aware of the limitations on that. Would be cool if we had better control over this without being overwhelming to users.

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