Humane and Minimalist Interface

23 Feb 2006 18:34 - (0) comments

I couldn't agree more with the following two postings regarding Fowler's HumaneInterface blogpost.

Rob Lally: Minimal interfaces are great on objects that are only going to be used a few times. If a class is going to be used (in the case of lists/arrays ) 10s or 100s of millions of times then giving it a broader interface is by far the best choice.

James Robertson: What we seem to have are two very different approaches to the class design problem. I think the Smalltalk/Ruby one is better, because it favors putting code where it belongs. The Java approach implicitly favors lots of utility classes.

Joey deVilla lists the most important points made in the discussion. Common interfaces should be rich enough to handle to common tasks.
Or do those in favor of minimalist interfaces for common classes prefer programming on a minimalist mobile phone keyboard over an Qwerty keyboard?

If Java's core classes are rich enough we wouldn't be needing Commons Utils.