Evolvability of Code: Uniform Access Principle

Most programmers like freedom. So there are many means of hiding implementations in modern programming languages, e.g. interfaces in Java, header files in C/C++ and visibility modifiers like private and protected in most object-oriented languages. Even your ordinary functions or public class interface gives you the freedom to change the implementation without needing to touch the clients. Evolvability in this sense means you can change and refine your implementations without requiring others, namely clients of your code, to change.

Changing the class interface or function signatures within a project is often possible and feasible, at least if you have access to all client code and use powerful refactoring tools. If you published your code as a library or do not want to break all client code or forcing them to adapt to your changes you have to consider your interface code to be fixed. This takes away some of your precious freedom. So you have to design your interfaces carefully with evolability in mind.

Some programming languages implement the uniform access principle (UAP) that eases evolvability in that it allows you to migrate from public attributes to properties/method calls without changing the clients: Read and write access to the attribute uses the same syntax as invoking corresponding methods. For clarification an example in Python where you may start with a class like:

class Person(object):
  def __init__(self, name, age):
    self.name = name
    self.age = age

Using the above class is trivial as follows

>>> pete = Person("pete", 32)
>>> print pete.age
32
# a year has passed
>>> pete.age = 33
>>> print pete.age
33

Now if the age is not a plain value anymore but needs checking, like always being greater zero or is calculated based on some calendar you can turn it to a property like so:

class Person(object):
  def __init__(self, name, age):
    self.name = name
    self._age = age

  @property
  def age(self):
    return self._age

  @age.setter
  def age(self, new_age):
    if new_age < 0:
      raise ValueError("Age under 0 is not possible")
    self._age = new_age

Now the nice thing is: The above client code still works without changes!

Scala uses a similar and quite concise mechanism for implementing the UAP wheres .NET provides some special syntax for properties but still migration from public fields easily possible.

So in languages supporting the UAP you can start really simple with public attributes holding the plain value without worrying about some potential future. If you later need more sophisticated stuff like caching, computation of the value, validation or even remote retrieval you can add it using language features without touching or bothering clients.

Unfortunately some powerful and widespread languages like Java and C++ lack support for UAP. Changing a public field to a more complex property means the introduction of getter and setter methods and changing all clients. Therefore you see, especially in Java, many data classes littered with trivial getter and setter pairs doing nothing interesting and introducing unnecessary bloat to maintain the evolvability of the code.