I don't think the Law of Demeter should be called a “Law”, FWIW. It should more reasonably be called a “Rule” or maybe even just “Guideline”. I've seen someone aptly describe the effect of dogmatic adherence to the LoD in large frameworks as “bloated middlemen classes full of forwarding methods.” Clearly, while tight coupling and low cohesion are undesirable, decoupling and cohesion taken to the extreme mean that a unit fulfills an infinitely narrow task with infinitely minimal communication with the rest of the world — in other words, it's useless.

In a GUI widget whose purpose is to contain other widgets, f.ex, it's fine to assume knowledge that an instance of this class will have children, and to reach for these children through the container class.

Makeshifts last the longest.

In reply to Re: Definition of Law of Demeter by Aristotle
in thread Are lvalue methods (as properties) a good idea? by jplindstrom

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