Now first off I have to say I have a lot of time for Allen Holub. Ever since I got a review copy of his “Taming Java Threads”:http://www.apress.com/book/bookDisplay.html?bID=35 a few years ago, it has become my bible for threading in Java. Allen Holub’s article “extends is evil”:http://www.javaworld.com/javaworld/jw-08-2003/jw-0801-toolbox.html made some very valid points – in fact I realised that I’ve subconsciously completely removed implementational inheritance from my code – the places in which the use of an extends relationship made sense seemed to occur less and less frequently.
Slightly less informative was his latest piece “Why getters and setters are evil”:http://www.javaworld.com/javaworld/jw-09-2003/jw-0905-toolbox.html. I understand the logic and applaud him for raising this to peoples attention, but feel the rather abstract article could do with more in the way of concrete articles.
In anycase it seems that Allen is working on a new book, Patterns: Learning Design Patterns by Looking at Code, which I’ll be sure to pickup.