Why is almost everything in the API final

[Mario Torre]

On Tue, 2013-09-03 at 08:34 +0200, Fabrizio Giudici wrote:
> On Tue, 03 Sep 2013 07:16:06 +0200, Tom Eugelink <tbee at tbee.org> wrote:
> 
> > AFAIK there was never a framework that used final a lot, so time will  
> > tell if the choice was right. Swing and the JDK made it this far. But
> 
> The NetBeans Platform API does use final a lot for the same rationale  
> we're discussing now.
> 
> > I'm suspecting the choice may have been made motivated more from the  
> > perspective of the developers of the framework (a few people) and not as  
> > much from the users (many people).
> 
> That's true, but you're misusing the perspective. Many users would only  
> see some minor impact of extending a class, while the few developers would  
> see the accumulation of a huge number of problems because those minor  
> things are multiplied by the large number of users. It's precisely by  
> putting oneself in the perspective of the developers that 'final' makes  
> sense.

I've designed quite a few APIs and have extended Swing in a number of
very creative ways over the years. While the extensibility comes handy
after the 10+ years old API doesn't do anymore the things you would
like, you quickly realise it's really part of the problems in the first
place, so I agree completely with Fabrizio here.

Cheers,
Mario