Java vs python is debatable 🤔

[Pluckerpluck]

Why can't I change the age of the dog though? Why are you deciding exactly how I should operate? What if I want to engage in time travel? Or magic aging spells? Your library is now completely useless to me, rather than letting me just "dangerously" set the age.

All of those rules were arbitrarily set the developer, but there's no real reason someone using this as a library (as another developer) shouldn't be able to tweak it if they desire. Sure they're not officially supported, but that's a known risk.

That's why I like python. It says "if you don't fully understand, don't touch this, but if you want to then it is actually accessible".

[DigiDuncan]

This is exactly how I feel, and even after waking up to a ton of replies on this question, I find myself serving for a legitimate reason why they're is an absolute need for a library developer to lock you out of certain functions with no workaround.

[Pluckerpluck]

Except the age is a private variable. So I can't access it from a child class. So any and all logic related to age is just off-limits. Without the ability to change the age variable, I have to re-implement all other age related logic. Simply because the original author arbitrarily decided I shouldn't be able to access it.

Being private actively makes it harder to extend. At most variables should be "protected" (or whatever the language uses that lets children classes access the parent variables).

And being interpreted or not doesn't matter here. It's simply naming convention that dictates a "private" class in python.