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POWhy are many developers opposed to using the "protected" modifier in OOP?
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  1. POWhy are many developers opposed to using the "protected" modifier in OOP?
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    copied!<p>A co-worker of mine is taking an <em>Introduction to Object Oriented Programming</em> class and was asked a discussion question by his professor:</p> <blockquote> <p><strong>Why are many developers opposed to using the "protected" modifer on/within classes?</strong></p> </blockquote> <p>When the question was brought up at lunch, my co-workers and I couldn't think of reasons why someone might be <em>opposed</em> to using the <code>protected</code> modifier on a class. Setting the premise of the question aside (which assumes that many developers are in fact opposed to the <code>protected</code> modifier; are they?), we tried to figure out why.</p> <p>Personally, the only times that I've used the <code>protected</code> access modifier on a class is when I've written code that I might want to supplement in a test environment. For example, I might write a base class with no debugging information and then create a new class for testing, inheriting from the base class and overwriting its methods to add in debug output code before/after the base method calls. I suppose I could just as easily use a design that involves interfaces and dependency injection to accomplish the same goal, but my only experience with <code>protected</code> has been for testing purposes. In this case, the only reason to avoid <code>protected</code> is because you can accomplish the same thing in better ways.</p> <p>Why might developers be opposed to using the <code>protected</code> modifier in their OOP design?</p> <p><em>NOTE: Because the professor is asking a general OOP question not specific to any one language, I'm not sure if answers might be weighted differently because of different implementations of <code>protected</code> in C#, Java, etc..</em></p>
 

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