Getters and setters evil?

at 2004-12-15 in General by friebe (5 comments)

They are a waste of CPU time, but more important, they are a waste of programmer time. Not just for the people writing the code and tests, but for the people who have to read and understand them as well.

I tend to disagree:

It is fairly easy to understand getters and setters: They follow the naming rule of getSomething, setSomething (and maybe isSomething, hasSomething and addSomething) for accessing the property something.
It is easy to write getters and setters: In the .nedit-configuration file we have in our CVS here, for instance, we have a shortcut that generates them from member variables
On: They waste CPU time: Agreed - function (and method) calls are expensive in PHP - but CPU time is not the only factor to be considered when developing an application: Readability (which the verbosity adds) and maintainability (the behaviour of a setter can be changed easily without breaking the API) are the non-plus-ultra in importance when it comes to keeping an application running. And getters and setters are readable
Design by contract: Getters and setters can be part of an interface whereas members cannot.

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Getters and setters evil?

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