Is it really tempting for people? They’ve given me too many headaches when I’ve had to reformat or add functionality to files.
Unless it’s a simple single use script that fit on the computer screen, I don’t feel like global variables would ever be tempting, unless it’s for constants.
They’ve given me too many headaches…
I.e. you did use them, but learned the hard way why you shouldn’t.
Very likely OP is a student, or entry-level programmer, and is avoiding them because they were told to, and just haven’t done enough refactoring & debugging or worked on large enough code bases to ‘get’ it yet.
This community makes more sense when you realize the majority of users are CS students.
Hey, don’t you group me in with people who have had a small amount of real training!
Just create a global object and stuff your variable in there. Now you have a global singleton and that’s not a purely bad practice :D
Not necessarily a bad practice if the singleton is immutable, and it’s provided via dependency injection for example.
As a hobby coder: “mmmhm, mmmm, mmhm… I know some of these words!”
Software dev is full of obscure keywords that describe otherwise pretty simple or basic concepts you stumble upon in practice naturally and that you probably already understand.
- singleton: a class/object that is designed to be single use, i.e. only ever instantiated with a single instance. Typically used when you use class/objects more for flow control or to represent the state of the program itself, rather than using it to represent data
- immutable: read-only, i.e. unchangeable
- dependency injection: basically when you pass a function or object into another function object, thereby extending their effective functionality, typically for modular code and to separate concerns.
Here’s one more of my favourite examples of such a keyword: memoization
“But what if I put the whole program into a class and then made it a class wide variable?”
Sounds like the piece of legacy software I have do deal with.
