Talk:Encapsulation (computer programming)

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If you don't already know what encapsulation is, you'll likely not understand a word of this article. Too technical, too preoccupied with OOP. I'm a reasonably experienced developer, and I had to read it slowly to understand anything at all. 213.30.149.61 (talk) 12:09, 9 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Why "orthogonal"

Why is the word "orthogonal" used on about the 9th line of this article? Doesn't it mean "absolutely without influence"? I suspect that even to establish its possibility in this situation would require some heavy-duty theorizing. How about "apparently (or superficially, or tentatively, or ?) independent? -lifeform (talk) 05:37, 21 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

History? Summary!

And then everyone wonder why WP has a bad rep. I came here to look up where Encapsulation was introduced, but I find nothing. Great. --jae (talk) 01:25, 25 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Edit the page to add that information. It won't appear by itself. 81.187.215.34 (talk) 18:21, 15 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Encapsulation is information hiding

Honestly, I was surprised to find that there are two articles covering what I always thought was the exact same thing. Despite what the oft cited JavaWorld article claims, encapsulation and information hiding are synonymous.

I'm not saying there is only one definition, but if you look back to the first real references to the term "encapsulation" in the late 1970s, you see that encapsulation was first used to mean "designing software in such a way as to hide certain details from your clients", i.e. information hiding. In fact, in "Concise Notes on Software Engineering" (1979), the author refers to this paper – the one used by the JavaWorld article to make the distinction between information hiding and encapsulation – as describing "the priciples of encapsulation". This is just one of the more clear examples. Practically every early reference to "encapsulation" describes it as synonymous with information hiding.

Later on, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, as object-orientated programming gained traction, the "encapsulation mechanisms" provided by some OO languages started to become synonymous with encapsulation. That is, to some people "encapsulation" became "bundling data with methods to hide it from clients". Unfortunately, due to the existence of "public" access modifiers (a programming feature designed to break encapsulation), at some point some people started thinking that encapsulation was simply "bundling data with methods", with no reference to information hiding whatsoever. Of course, without encapsulation, "bundling data with methods" is merely syntactic sugar.

This is all my analysis though. If I get the time I will edit the article to indicate that encapsulation is information hiding, and provide many sources to back it up. Hpesoj00 (talk) 21:32, 3 August 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Agreed. This article does a very poor job of articulating what encapsulation really is: internalizing (hiding) implementation details. It does do a fine job of confusing readers by incorrectly suggesting that encapsulation means bundling data with methods; but that concept is actually called Object Oriented Programming. If these concepts were the same, you would not find examples of encapsulation within non-OO languages. This whole article needs major revisions, but in the short-term I'm going to remove the "historical importance" section. This section has never had any citations, much less valid citations. Jamarr81 (talk) 20:34, 6 March 2017 (UTC)[reply]

In the long term, the Encapsulation is not Information Hiding article on JavaWorld is bunk and needs to be removed. It does a fine job at describing how to approach and design Object Oriented Software, but you cannot just given an example of designing OO software and call it encapsulation simply because you used encapsulation to improve the design. This article right now is a horrible reference for new developers that don't know any better. Jamarr81 (talk) 20:34, 6 March 2017 (UTC)[reply]

@Jamarr81: I have compiled what is essentially a chronological literature review here of the concept of encapsulation. I never quite finished it, and have yet to incorporate it into this article because I don't know if it is in an appropriate format for Wikipedia.

I agree that the JavaWorld article is at odds with common usage of the term prior to its publication. It seems to be the original source of the definition it espouses. Even Parnus, the author of the paper the article cites who coined the term "information hiding" has stated in later papers that "encapsulation" is related or even synonymous to "information hiding". I recall that I found one academic paper that gave a similar definition, but I think I decided that it was not a particularly reliable source, and did not include it in my review. I no longer have access to the academic database that I used for my review, but I do still have all the papers somewhere, so I should check that I wasn't being biased in my omission. Hpesoj00 (talk) 09:22, 7 March 2017 (UTC)[reply]