This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Agile Buzz by Keith Ray. Original Post: Minimal versus "Humane" Class API Design Feed Title: MemoRanda Feed URL: http://homepage.mac.com/1/homepage404ErrorPage.html Feed Description: Keith Ray's notes to be remembered on agile software development, project management, oo programming, and other topics. Latest Agile Buzz Posts Latest Agile Buzz Posts by Keith Ray Latest Posts From MemoRanda

Interesting stuff about class API design:

good: HumaneInterface.html

doesn't get that intention-revealing interfaces are good, "tell, don't ask" is good, and code duplication is bad: cafeaulait

reaction to the above: cincomsmalltalk.com/blog/ Don't forget to read the comments. My comment:

You just know that because Java's List class doesn't have a "last" method, that everyone who needs to access the last element is going to have to write "alist.get( alist.size() - 1 ) WHICH IS DUPLICATED CODE. (And buggy as well, failing if the list is empty.)

Duplicated code is a sign of bad design, and leads to bugs. There's probably been a million bugs where someone coded alist.get( alist.size() ) attempting to get the last element (which will instead throw an exception), and no doubt less that 80% of those bugs have been fixed.

It wouldn't be so bad if Java programmers could extend existing classes (Like Cocoa programmers and Smalltalk programmers).

more reactions:

simplicity rules in the right place

java net style vs smalltalk ruby style (though I'm not sure I agree with 437 methods for Smalltalk's Object Class!)