On Tue, 2013-09-03 at 08:34 +0200, Fabrizio Giudici wrote: > On Tue, 03 Sep 2013 07:16:06 +0200, Tom Eugelink <t...@tbee.org> wrote: > > > AFAIK there was never a framework that used final a lot, so time will > > tell if the choice was right. Swing and the JDK made it this far. But > > The NetBeans Platform API does use final a lot for the same rationale > we're discussing now. > > > I'm suspecting the choice may have been made motivated more from the > > perspective of the developers of the framework (a few people) and not as > > much from the users (many people). > > That's true, but you're misusing the perspective. Many users would only > see some minor impact of extending a class, while the few developers would > see the accumulation of a huge number of problems because those minor > things are multiplied by the large number of users. It's precisely by > putting oneself in the perspective of the developers that 'final' makes > sense.
I've designed quite a few APIs and have extended Swing in a number of very creative ways over the years. While the extensibility comes handy after the 10+ years old API doesn't do anymore the things you would like, you quickly realise it's really part of the problems in the first place, so I agree completely with Fabrizio here. Cheers, Mario
