Classes vs. Data Structures

Post by hoseja » Wed, Jun 19, 2019, 8:26 AM UTC

Aromasin wrote: post #167

I enjoy the authors "question/answer" style of writing. I often find myself asking questions just like this when reading an article, and find that when the author isn't "question focused" they never get answered. It seems that when the entire writing style pivots on the idea, the author forces themselves to consider more Q's to pad out the content and, incidentally or otherwise, provide more A's.

Post by MaxBarraclough » Sat, Jun 22, 2019, 8:59 PM UTC

jayd16 wrote: post #33

hudon wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get that in your application, you may want to keep a linked list behind its interface 90% of the time. However, considering your system as a whole, at some point you may want to take that linked list data and write it to a database, in which case the cleanest thing is to bypass the interface and extract the "data structure object" so to speak and deal with it in a database-related object, rather than encumbering yo…

This is a violation of OOP. Instead, consider methods that produce and consume a serialized representation of the data instead. Things like Java serialization and Python pickle attempt to do what you say and are considered failures (or at least security risks) because they allow a third party to act on object implementation internals. Security aside, a denormalized representation of data could be different than the i…