To paraphrase Mr. Wall (I think, "I prefer people stay out of my house because they are not invited, not because I have a shotgun". Public/private can dominate a huge java app, and while occasionally useful for debug, they make tracing painful and the app slower.

Regarding "stupid coworkers", I prefer to either educate them or not work with them. I consider myself a professional, I expect the people who work with me to act like ones as well.

"Swing is the same way". No, it's much less productive. Try a complex layout in Swing, and the same in Perl/Tk. The Perl/Tk code will be 5x shorter (or more) and you can write it in much less time. I have spent literally hours fighting with the horrible evils (and horrible syntax) of "GridBagLayout".

I do agree that encapsulation is a good thing, but I don't like my hand forced. Some times, objects are not needed, and what you really have is code and a datastructure. Or a datastructure of objects. Objects everywhere is usually overkill and undermines simplicity, often making the code *more* complex. I am very disciplined as a coder, and I prefer to enforce my own disciplines. I do not need a language and it's totalitarian conventions slapping my hand.

Contrary to popular belief, good C code can be written. It just takes *good* coders. Java allows mediocre coders to appear to be talented because they are hiding behind OOP that allows huge interconnects between hundreds of files. Where a procedural coder can quickly be hit for not having a design, an OO java coder can usually say "of coruse I have design, look, UML!" and the design is often just a bunch of random objects. and that's PC.

Anyhow, long story short, Java and encapsulation don't make good coders. Good coders write well in all languages. Java is just decent at keeping bad coders from really showing it, and I think that's more dangerous than broken code. You don't know who in your organization is good and who is bad.

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