This has been bugging me for awhile. This seems like the best forum to ask about it.
"With great power comes great responsibility." This quotation is hard to pin down. There are several versions of it to be found. This particular phrasing of the statement probably belongs to Stan Lee, but I think the phrase, in another form, is older than that. It seems to me that there is tension here, forces pulling in orthogonal directions. In systems which include a MOP, it seems as though encapsulation is sort of hosed at will. Certainly I'm not arguing against the MOP, it's one of the most powerful ideas in programming. For some things, it seems absolutely necessary, but then... there's the abuse of the MOP. I've done it to spectacular effect :D and when one is under constant pressure to ship, one tends to reach for the longest lever in the room. On one hand, I can avoid writing a lot of code at times this way, but on the other hand, what I've done is liable to confuse the hell out of whatever poor bastard is maintaining my code now. I've also had to wade through some very confusing code that also did it. You know, as long as it's me doing it, it's fine, but there's only one of me, and there's in the neighborhood of 6,775,235,700 of you! Is this tension irreconcilable? -- Casey Ransberger
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