Software Engineering Made Easy: A Comprehensive Reference Guide for Writing Good Code

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to APress Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2025

M. GählerSoftware Engineering Made Easyhttps://doi.org/10.1007/979-8-8688-1386-3_3

3. Classes

Marco Gähler¹  

(1)

Zürich, Zürich, Switzerland

 

I think it’s a new feature. Don’t tell anyone it was an accident.

—Larry Wall

Classes may be useful at times, but they are also among the most misused constructs in modern software engineering. Classes are frequently too long and, therefore, hard to understand. While it is widely understood that global variables should be avoided, the member variables of a class often behave like mini-globals, accessible throughout the entire class. This practice is only justifiable if the class is very short; otherwise, the member variables ...