Mathias Verraes: Final Classes

Mathias Verraes has posted some of his thoughts about using "final" in classes and what kind of impression it gives about your code.

I make all my classes final by default. I even configured the templates in my IDE prefix new classes with 'final'. I've often explained my reasoning to people. A blog post is in order! A guiding principle here is Clarity of Intent. [...] The reason we need clean code, is not for the compiler. It's to help our fellow developers, third parties, and even ourselves in six months time, understand the purpose and the design of our system.

He relates this concept of clean code and clarity back to the SOLID development principles, specifically the "Open/Closed Principle". This principle states that software should be open for extension but not for modification. It suggests that providing a stable, known API is a responsibility of the developer and using things like callbacks and listeners is a better way to extend. He gets into a bit more PHP-specific issues around using "final", including the difficulties that it can cause during testing.

Link: http://verraes.net/2014/05/final-classes-in-php/