Violating Encapsulation

Dave Astels blogs about it.

Something I see all the time, on every team I've been involved with, is code like the following (classes are generalized from examples):

MyThing[] things = thingManager.getThingList();
for (int i = 0; i < things.length; i++) {
MyThing thing = things[i];
if (thing.getName().equals(thingName)) {
return thingManager.delete(thing);
}
}

This code is tightly coupled to the implementation of myThing in that it gets the name property, knows that it's a string, etc. This is a classic approach from the old days or procedural programming. It is NOT OO.

How about:

MyThing[] things = thingManager.getThingList();
for (int i = 0; i < things.length; i++) {
MyThing thing = things[i];
if (thing.isNamed(thingName)) {
return thingManager.delete(thing);
}
}

I've seen this procedural approach thousand times. The problem is that a lot of developers think "procedural": they never met smalltalk/lisp with its closures. That's why learning a new programming language is good: you will think different, even if you will never get a chance to use the "newly acquired" programming language.