C Programming FAQs: Frequently Asked Questions

Wasted money. Lots of wasted money.

There's nothing more frustrating than a lousy abstraction that is encapsulated. When a developer encapsulates a bad abstraction, users continually attempt to violate the abstraction's encapsulation barrier. When that happens, don't waste time trying to make it even harder for users to access the object's internals; fix the abstraction instead.

Don't think of encapsulation as a club with which the good guys (the class's authors) prevent the bad guys (the class's users) from looking inside an object. Object-oriented design and programming is not a contest between developers and users.