I've only recently started real clojure development, so very much still
learning what styles work and what don't. I have a question about naming
attribute getters...
Suppose I want to model "fruit" entities. I will use a hash-map to
represent the data for each such entity, and will defn a "make" function to
construct fruit instances. I will put "make" and any other fruit-related
functions within a new namespace "myprog.fruit".
Because my data representation is a map, strictly speaking I don't need any
attribute getter functions. Because I could simply use the attribute
keywords in the map as my getter functions, eg (:color fru). But I will
create actual getter functions within my namespace anyway, for a few
reasons.
1. It will signal to any users of my fruit library, which attributes are
"official" and are expected to be used / supported, versus attributes which
are more of an implementation detail.
2. Some attributes will simply be (defn color [fru] (:color fru)),
whereas others are less direct, eg (defn red? [fru] (= :red fru)) or
another eg (defn packingvol [{:keys [size]}] (* size size size)).
3. Down the track I can change my data representation, and just
reimplement the getter functions. Users of my fruit library who have stuck
to my getter functions interface will not need to change a thing.
This approach seems okay to me so far, though I am open to critiques and
alternative suggestions. But one issue has come to mind... leading to the
question of this post...
At the end of 2. above, I have defined a local let symbol "size" as part of
the map destructuring. But it so happens I have already defined a size
getter, namely (defn size [fru] (:size fru)). So within the definition of
packingvol my size getter is masked by the local symbol "size". Now I'm
not sure this masking causes much harm... I don't actually need to use the
size getter here, and if I really needed it I could always use
"myprog.fruit/size"... But something still makes me feel uncomfortable
about it, maybe because this masking could end up happening a lot within my
fruit.clj source code file.
Now I could just switch to a new naming convention for my getters, ie
"color-get", "red?-get", "size-get", "packingvol-get" etc. But I'm not
sure I like the extra verbosity. And for users of my fruit library - who
will be working in a different namespace - this problem mostly goes away as
they will probably be namespace-qualifying access to my getters.
Is using self-named attribute getters a good idea?
Thanks,
Mark.
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