On Thu, Sep 12, 2019 at 1:33 PM Matthew Brown <matthewmatt...@gmail.com> wrote:
> What if Java suddenly said that all properties are suddenly private, and >> can only be accessed through getter/setter methods? >> > > If Java announced that the next major version was to make the change after > 95% of userland developers favoured it and over 2/3rds of their internals > team did, I'd think "huh ok I guess they have good reasons". > > For 20 years people have developed code based on that feature. It was >> never considered an error, and often not even considered bad practice > > > You seem to be arguing against *ever* changing something that a majority > once thought was good, and fundamental to a given system. Lots of things > fall into that category - restricting voting to men, segregation, etc. > Now you're just being silly. I actually don't have a problem with fundamental language change, provided that the positives that are gained far outweigh the negatives of the BC break and there is no other way to accomplish those positives without such a BC break. There are a myriad of ways to achieve what the RFC attempts to achieve. Whether that's analysis tools, custom error handlers, detailed code reviews, etc. Nothing prevents anyone from initializing all of their variables or performing as many sanity checks on a variable before accessing it as they want to. Nothing in the RFC is required to implement other new functionality like enums, union types, variable typing, etc. I also think it's a bit of a stretch to compare something like variable initialization with things that denied people their basic human rights. -- Chase Peeler chasepee...@gmail.com