Alas, Eiffel looked like Modula (Pascal), rather than like C/C++, so it never caught on. The important part, though, was the idea of class invariants + method pre-conditions + method post-conditions. Meyer's book, from years before Java and "Java beans" infected the group-think, talked about classes that explicitly were constructed in a valid state (which also meshes well with the practice of immutability), and methods with explicit conditions of their requirements and what they were guaranteeing they would accomplish.
"Java beans" pretty much took these otherwise sound engineering principles and pissed all over them.
Rather than having a constructor that builds an object that you can then start using, you have to guess (unless documentation is very good, which it won't be) which setters must be called before "bean" is non-crap.
Yes, I'm bitter that such an obviously flawed practice became standard operating procedure, to the point that doing things right is viewed as suspect.
(above is a special case of below)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_by_contract
Alas, Eiffel looked like Modula (Pascal), rather than like C/C++, so it never caught on. The important part, though, was the idea of class invariants + method pre-conditions + method post-conditions. Meyer's book, from years before Java and "Java beans" infected the group-think, talked about classes that explicitly were constructed in a valid state (which also meshes well with the practice of immutability), and methods with explicit conditions of their requirements and what they were guaranteeing they would accomplish.
"Java beans" pretty much took these otherwise sound engineering principles and pissed all over them.
Rather than having a constructor that builds an object that you can then start using, you have to guess (unless documentation is very good, which it won't be) which setters must be called before "bean" is non-crap.
Yes, I'm bitter that such an obviously flawed practice became standard operating procedure, to the point that doing things right is viewed as suspect.