Object orgy

In computer programming, an object orgy is a situation in which objects are insufficiently encapsulated via information hiding, allowing unrestricted access to their internals. This is a common failure (or anti pattern) in object oriented design or object oriented programming, and it can lead to increased maintenance needs and problems, and even unmaintainable complexity.

Members may be declared public to avoid the effort or syntactic overhead of providing proper accessors for them. This may increase readability of the class, but at the cost of the consequences described above. For some languages, a member intended to be readable by other objects can be made modifiable because the language has no convenient construct for read only access. An object orgy may be a symptom of coding to an immature and anemic design, when a designer has insufficiently analysed the interactions between objects. It can also arise from laziness or haste in implementing a design, especially if a programmer does not communicate enough with a designer, or from reluctance to revise a design when problems arise, which also encourages many other anti patterns. Many programmers view objects as anemic data repositories and manipulate them violating Information Hiding, Encapsulation and Design by Contracts principles.

In general, encapsulation is broken because the design of other classes requires it, and a redesign is needed. If that is not the case, it may be sufficient to re code the system according to best practices. Once the interfaces are published irrevocably, it may be too late to fix them.