Every once in a while I come across something that mentions one of the Gang of Four patterns and I look it up to refresh my memory and go "what the fuck, why would anyone do this"
Of course the answer is "classes suck", I guess I just subconsciously assume that we have collectively moved past the need for classes, and keep being surprised when we have not
Like look at this crap https://refactoring.guru/design-patterns/visitor
The described "problem" here is just. Why wouldn't you... write a function instead of a method. What
@socks where do I put the function? In (corporate, idk if it's actually necessary) Java you need a class to hold your function for you. Also you wanna be able to type-check and, if required, swap out the whole construct, which classes are useful for
@noiob Yeah and this is (one reason) why Java sucks to use!
The type checking is fine, you can have polymorphic functions
@socks but you won't convince execs that they should ditch a language they've been successfully using for 10-20 years
@noiob I am also aware of this!
@socks can you typecheck for a type of function though?
@noiob Depending on the language, yeah, easily
@socks interesting, I don't think I ever used one that could
@noiob I get that, and I think a big reason why they end up so messy is because classes are a terrible way of organizing code
"Oh I can't change the class because I might break something about it" Okay, write a function that takes in nodes and outputs XML. Boom, no changes required to the class