nudist community anti-pattern

A sure sign of a dysfunctional object-oriented design is the nudist community anti-pattern. The defining characteristic of this anti-pattern is that all the design's important objects don't have the mutual data privacy that's yielded by true encapsulation. (Still more care is required when working with an implementation that relies primarily on conventions to enforce data hiding.)

At first glance, the information has been properly separated and gathered into individual objects with distinct responsibilities. However, in practice, each object performs its single responsibility by direct requests for additional data from its fellow objects. Hence, when the shape of the data inevitably changes, not only the responsible object must change but also every other object that asks it directly for that data.

The remedy is to revise the nature of the interactions between objects to better respect individual privacy. Objects shouldn't need to openly publish members to accomplish tasks, but instead should send structured messages that demurely ask an object to produce a necessary sub-goal or intermediate result. If it's difficult to decide which object should be responsible for a role, that could be an indication that the design needs refactoring because requirements have changed.

When an object simply must have information from another, the package of information can still be suitably wrapped for handling by the outsider object, e.g. limiting the exposure to partial instead of full or restricting access to "look don't touch". Also, by putting it in a "box" before giving it, the interaction as a whole can be kept loose because each participant need only depend on a shared abstraction with semantic meaning (cf. "dependency inversion").