Sorry for short replies. Tapping this on a phone. I think final is a must on static fields, except in a few exceptional cases. While it doesn't mean immutable it expresses something useful and makes static sins harder to commit.
I feel similarly about instance fields where possible. Instance fields which hold state must be mutable, but fields which refer to sub-components should not. A Car should have a mutable fuel level, but its Engine should not be. I find these two practices useful enough to suggest they should be enforced. In fact I have been making such changes regularly. I am also a big fan of declaring classes (or more narrowly, certain methods) final by default. Design for extension or prohibit if says the wise Reverend Bloch. But this isn't something I'd actively foist on anyone since it needs judgment about design intent. I actually used to write method params final by default but stopped, even though I like what it promotes. Nobody is pushing that though. Sean On Feb 13, 2010 9:18 PM, "Ted Dunning" <ted.dunn...@gmail.com> wrote: I find it mildly expressive to be able to say: public static final String KEYWORD_CONSTANT = "foobledy foo"; My reader will know that this is a constant that is safe to use as such. Other than this and the syntactic captured variable case, I don't use final. On Sat, Feb 13, 2010 at 1:05 PM, Benson Margulies <bimargul...@gmail.com >wrote: > That doesn't, sadly, prevent > > x[2] = 1; > > So, to me, final is too weak to be useful. I pu... -- Ted Dunning, CTO DeepDyve
