Hi Colin! Welcome to Clojure! On Wed, Jun 15, 2011 at 11:41 AM, Colin Yates <colin.ya...@gmail.com> wrote: > the very common Person class will expose get/setName(), get/setAge() etc. > and as a consumer I have no idea how the results are calcualted.
The FP approach certainly takes some getting used to after a lot of Java! I like the fact that a lot of (post-Java) languages go out of their way to avoid all the boilerplate get/set methods in various ways because this is very high ceremony. I was lucky enough to be exposed to functional programming in the 80's and then move into OOP in the 90's (with C++ in '92 and Java in '97). Whilst I am still "unlearning" some OOP habits, I'm more comfortable with the non-OO approach and dusting off my older programming approaches. I'm finding, as I introduce more people to Clojure, that folks without a lot of OOP experience tend to pick up FP much quicker and aren't as concerned about get/set "encapsulation". My experience with OOP has been that essential properties of objects rarely change into computed functions (and derived properties are computed functions in the first place). That said, of course there are situations where an essential property needs a function: when you have side-effects on the get/set operation, such as recording changes, but I'd argue that is likely to be known upfront. Also given the preference for immutable data, you're much less likely to use/need setters. My suggestion would be to code with raw maps instead of functions-wrapping-maps and see how things go. By using raw maps you'll find that a lot of power can be brought to bear with standard Clojure functions. As for the age property on Person, that seems to be a common example given to justify the use of getters but age is a derived property, based on date of birth, and every real world system I've worked with that represents people, and needs age, uses a function for it upfront. So I think that's a bit of a strawman :) Hope that helps? -- Sean A Corfield -- (904) 302-SEAN An Architect's View -- http://corfield.org/ World Singles, LLC. -- http://worldsingles.com/ Railo Technologies, Inc. -- http://www.getrailo.com/ "Perfection is the enemy of the good." -- Gustave Flaubert, French realist novelist (1821-1880) -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Clojure" group. To post to this group, send email to clojure@googlegroups.com Note that posts from new members are moderated - please be patient with your first post. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to clojure+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/clojure?hl=en
