Comment by petesergeant
Comment by petesergeant 12 hours ago
That’s how every other object works, why would that be surprising?
Comment by petesergeant 12 hours ago
That’s how every other object works, why would that be surprising?
What parent commenter meant was language level support of immutable objects. There is const, in for example JavaScript, but it supports only immutability of variables, not objects themselves. That later one is possible in C++ for example, where const can be used for both. Of course, it’s still possible to fake immutability with interfaces in some languages, or have a real one forced by implementation (like with Temporals), but it’s much nicer to have an indicator forcing that.
I would like to add, that both variable and object immutability should be the default, and mutability should have a keyword, not other way around how in C++ and Java.
That's a fair observation, and yet anecdotally I agree with the parent comment. In my career I fixed quite a few bugs about dates being passed around and unexpectedly modified, while I struggle to remember the same problem with objects in general (could be a case of selective memory).
If I had the guess, I'd say it's a combination of:
- the difference between the mental model and the implementation. Dates are objects but "feel" like values: dates are parsed from a single value, and when stored/printed they collapse back to a single value (as opposed to custom objects which are generally a bag of properties, and when printed/stored they still look like an object)
- most common date operations causes the original date object to be mutated, which implicitly causes developers to mutate the passed value even if that's not what they explicitly meant
So the default combination is a calling code that expects date to be treated as a value, and the called code accidentally mutating the data because it's convenient to do so. If anything then causes the original value to be saved back in the db, the data gets corrupted.
Most experienced developers will remember to make a copy of the date object both in the calling code and in the receiving code, but the default remains dangerously easy to get wrong.