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Rosa Control
@RosaCtrl
My take on encapsulation
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Sage Mitchell
@mx00s
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Replying to @ProgrammerDude and @puffnfresh
No, type systems that don't let us express constraints in full fidelity are bad, but we work with what we've got. Encapsulation is a necessary evil until types precisely specify what is and isn't possible.
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Rosa Control
@RosaCtrl
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
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Rosa Control
@RosaCtrl
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
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Brendan Zabarauskas
@brendanzab
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.
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Rosa Control
@RosaCtrl
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
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Brendan Zabarauskas
@brendanzab
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. 😅
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Brendan Zabarauskas
@brendanzab
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.
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