Private vs. Public members in practice (how important is encapsulation?) [closed]

Answer 1

Encapsulation is important when at least one of these holds:

1. Anyone but you is going to use your class (or they'll break your invariants because they don't read the documentation).
2. Anyone who doesn't read the documentation is going to use your class (or they'll break your carefully documented invariants). Note that this category includes you-two-years-from-now.
3. At some point in the future someone is going to inherit from your class (because maybe an extra action needs to be taken when the value of a field changes, so there has to be a setter).

If it is just for me, and used in few places, and I'm not going to inherit from it, and changing fields will not invalidate any invariants that the class assumes, only then I will occasionally make a field public.