I’ll give an example. At my previous company there was a program where you basically select a start date, select an end date, select the system and press a button and it reaches out to a database and pulls all the data following that matches those parameters. The horrors of this were 1. The queries were hard coded.
-
They were stored in a configuration file, in xml format.
-
The queries were not 1 entry. It was 4, a start, the part between start date and end date, the part between end date and system and then the end part. All of these were then concatenated in the program intermixed with variables.
-
This was then sent to the server as pure sql, no orm.
-
Here’s my favorite part. You obviously don’t want anyone modifying the configuration file so they encrypted it. Now I know what you’re thinking at some point you probably will need to modify or add to the configuration so you store an unencrypted version in a secure location. Nope! The program had the ability to encrypt and decrypt but there were no visible buttons to access those functions. The program was written in winforms. You had to open the program in visual studio, manually expand the size of the window(locked size in regular use) and that shows the buttons. Now run the program in debug. Press the decrypt button. DO NOT EXIT THE PROGRAM! Edit the file in a text editor. Save file. Press the encrypt button. Copy the encrypted file to any other location on your computer. Close the program. Manually email the encrypted file to anybody using the file.
We had some super old code in our company monorepo that was written by someone who became the CTO, there was a comment forbidding people from writing private methods in the code base because “we aren’t babies”. It explained so much about the awful code and why everything was crazy.
That sounds like someone who didn’t understand the purpose of private
Yet he was still in charge of all the engineers who did. He had people actively working against their best interests lol. Disaster
Yeah, that just seems like a recipe for disaster.
Access modifiers are definitely something I despise about OOP languages, though I understand that OOP’s nature makes them necessary.
I don’t think OOP’s nature makes them necessary, so much so as it enables them and popular programming principles encourage them. I think they’re a good thing, especially if there’s a way around them in case you can’t get the public interface changed and it doesn’t work for you, especially for performance reasons, but that should be done with care.
Funny story, when modding Unity games using external modloaders you’re writing C# code that references the game’s assemblies. And with modding you often need to access something that the developers made private/protected/internal. Now, you can use reflection for that, but a different trick you can use is to publicize the game’s assemblies for referencing in your code, and add an attribute to your assembly that tells the runtime to just… Let you ignore the access checks. And then you can just access everything as public.