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<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\nHonestly, if you are pulling shit like that in production code someone should definitely break both your thumbs if not worse. Libraries which pull shit like this are quickly being purged from the marketplace.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Academics vs. Production Coders<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Academics think stuff like the above is “good and proper.” They’ve never written a line of production code in their lives. They definitely have never written production systems that went over 10 years without any modifications despite drastic changes to the business model<\/em>. I have. It was written in the very early 1990s and is still in production today.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Not one of you writes code forward thinking and good enough to be placed in a private class.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Nobody does. It is the pinnacle of arrogance to place the actual functionality inside a hidden private class leaving the exposed class as just a wrapper. You completely violate the fundamental tenant of OOP. Polymorphism<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n When you bury the actual functionality inside a hidden private class passing const parameters you make it impossible to cleanly alter the class via inheritance. When you do it with methods that are not virtual one cannot even use override<\/a> to fix your problem. If you are passing a base class pointer around you get the base class implementation, no matter what the actual object is. Doesn’t that suck?<\/p>\n\n\n\n Academics and those who never studied actual Computer Science always design code like they are developing software for Walmart or some Internet startup. If there is a massive breach because they didn’t consider security, who cares? Nobody has gone to prison for that. The corporation will just buy N-months of credit monitoring and life will go on.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Those of us who have worked in the military contractor\/black-ops\/clearance required projects world and the FDA regulated world know that is not reality. In extreme cases you both go to prison and get barred from federal health programs<\/a>. That’s right, she can get neither Medicare nor Medicaid. If she’s dead broke, when she gets sick she dies. You can even be banned from the industry like Pharma-bro<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Yes children, your OpenSource hack-on-the-fly code finds its way into these systems. It causes deaths, failures, and breaches because you would rather have fun hacking on the fly than apply actual Software Engineering. (Agile is not<\/em> Software Engineering!)<\/p>\n\n\n\n Yeah, I was going to give you a military example, but I can do it all in one. There is one class of software on which all lives depend: LIMS (Laboratory Information Management Systems) Every pharmaceutical and most defense contractors have them. Besides test composition\/results and a bunch of other geekly things, one of the core assets held are MSDS (Material Safety Data Sheet<\/a>) records. Many factories just have the paper sheets instead of a LIMS.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Prior to any chemical compound becoming the next Ozempic<\/a> or a treatment for chemical\/biological weapons exposure, it starts out in a lab. An MSDS must exist for it, but your access to any content other than the “Hazards” section is restricted by your clearance\/employee role. Any chemical you can buy at a big box store, Pledge, Pine-Sol, ACT Flouride, etc. has a fully public MSDS. The antidotes for chemical\/biological weapons will never have fully public MSDS.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Take this LIMS market size report<\/a> with a grain of salt. They are measuring “new sales” with that $2.3 Billion. Many companies rolled their own prior to canned packages becoming available. When I did a project in the 1980s for NutraSweet R&D they had purchased VG LIMS. The labs have changed hands, but odds are they are still running that system. Once you get a LIMS system you hire people to maintain it and run the thing until you can no longer find hardware to run it on. You need all of the lab history in case you are sued. Just look at the Bayer Round-Up trials<\/a>. You need to keep that stuff forever. You also need to replicate point-in-time security levels. Yes, Dr. Susan has access to the information today in 2023, but did Dr. Susan have access to it on December 13th, 2013? (Leak\/breach tracing requirement.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n Let us say we are going to use the above TextEdit to display the various text blocks of an MSDS on the screen. Those who’ve never worked on the real world on production systems will try to put all of the security and editing in front of<\/em> the setPlainText() call. That’s a security breach waiting to happen. Dictator Xi thanks you for providing China with access to all of this advanced Western Technology.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It needs to be inside of the setPlainText() call. That needs to make the determination, based on the user security level, which characters to replace with ASCII block characters. Your derived class needs to munge the data up based on the user. Why here? This is a one and done. No matter where you use the method it will call the security subroutine, blotting out what should not be visible for this user. Editing in front of the call means you have to do it and test it each and every place data is displayed. The fool who used const and buried all functionality in a hidden private class really screwed the pooch.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Many people think the above doesn’t belong in a technical discussion. Someone should warn them about thinking. You write software based on your life experience. When you are not formally trained and don’t have decades of experience, you make some damned short-sighted decisions. That’s where const is dangerous. People in the above group are telling you to use const everywhere. When you work on a library claiming to have some OpenSource aspect to it, you need to make good decisions not perpetuate design flaws.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Don’t use const to define your interface if there is a single<\/em> use case that would need to modify the variable.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nPlymorphism<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
Realities of Regulation<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Real Life Situation – LIMS<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
How Do You Deal With It?<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
Details<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
Some Const Basics<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
The code<\/h2>\n\n\n\n