Comment by gf000
3 months ago
This is literally the core tenet of OOP, and arguably Java and friends did a decent enough job of that via encapsulation and visibility modifiers.
3 months ago
This is literally the core tenet of OOP, and arguably Java and friends did a decent enough job of that via encapsulation and visibility modifiers.
Not really. Look at any open source Java library, and you'll see that unless it's small enough to implement in a single package, it probably contains public classes that aren't meant to be part of the public API but are declared public so they can be used in other packages in the library codebase.
That's why they introduced a module system for Java in Java 9. It sounded pretty cool to me when they announced it, but it was a bit too late to make much difference in the Java ecosystem (Java 9 came out 21 years after Java 1) and I haven't heard much about it since then.
The module system is used extensively by the core java ecosystem (e.g. the jlink tool will create lean "JREs" based on which modules are actually used), and is getting more and more common in projects that are using a relatively modern Java version.
Besides, it makes sense to encapsulate at different scopes - a class, a package, a module, a library/application. These are "abstractions" on different levels, semantics, constraints.