Java instance variables vs. local variables

Question

I'm in my first programming class in high school. We're doing our end of the first semester project.

This project only involves one class, but many methods. My question is about best practice with instance variables and local variables. It seems that it would be much easier for me to code using almost only instance variables. But I'm not sure if this is how I should be doing it or if I should be using local variables more (I would just have to have methods take in the values of local variables a lot more).

My reasoning for this is also because a lot of times I'll want to have a method return two or three values, but this is of course not possible. Thus it just seems easier to simply use instance variables and never having to worry since they are universal in the class.

Answer 1

I haven't seen anyone discuss this so I'll throw in more food for thought. The short answer/advice is don't use instance variables over local variables just because you think they are easier to return values. You are going to make working with your code very very hard if you don't use local variables and instance variables appropriately. You will produce some serious bugs that are really hard to track down. If you want to understand what I mean by serious bugs, and what that might look like read on.

Let's try and use only instance variables as you suggest to write to functions. I'll create a very simple class:

public class BadIdea {
   public Enum Color { GREEN, RED, BLUE, PURPLE };
   public Color[] map = new Colors[] { 
        Color.GREEN, 
        Color.GREEN, 
        Color.RED, 
        Color.BLUE, 
        Color.PURPLE,
        Color.RED,
        Color.PURPLE };

   List<Integer> indexes = new ArrayList<Integer>();
   public int counter = 0;
   public int index = 0;

   public void findColor( Color value ) {
      indexes.clear();
      for( index = 0; index < map.length; index++ ) {
         if( map[index] == value ) {
            indexes.add( index );
            counter++;
         }
      }
   }

   public void findOppositeColors( Color value ) {
      indexes.clear();
      for( index = 0; i < index < map.length; index++ ) {
         if( map[index] != value ) {
            indexes.add( index );
            counter++;
         }
      }
   }
}

This is a silly program I know, but we can use it to illustrate the concept that using instance variables for things like this is a tremendously bad idea. The biggest thing you'll find is that those methods use all of the instance variables we have. And it modifies indexes, counter, and index every time they are called. The first problem you'll find is that calling those methods one after the other can modify the answers from prior runs. So for example, if you wrote the following code:

BadIdea idea = new BadIdea();
idea.findColor( Color.RED );
idea.findColor( Color.GREEN );  // whoops we just lost the results from finding all Color.RED

Since findColor uses instance variables to track returned values we can only return one result at a time. Let's try and save off a reference to those results before we call it again:

BadIdea idea = new BadIdea();
idea.findColor( Color.RED );
List<Integer> redPositions = idea.indexes;
int redCount = idea.counter;
idea.findColor( Color.GREEN );  // this causes red positions to be lost! (i.e. idea.indexes.clear()
List<Integer> greenPositions = idea.indexes;
int greenCount = idea.counter;

In this second example we saved the red positions on the 3rd line, but same thing happened!?Why did we lose them?! Because idea.indexes was cleared instead of allocated so there can only be one answer used at a time. You have to completely finish using that result before calling it again. Once you call a method again the results are cleared and you lose everything. In order to fix this you'll have to allocate a new result each time so red and green answers are separate. So let's clone our answers to create new copies of things:

BadIdea idea = new BadIdea();
idea.findColor( Color.RED );
List<Integer> redPositions = idea.indexes.clone();
int redCount = idea.counter;
idea.findColor( Color.GREEN );
List<Integer> greenPositions = idea.indexes.clone();
int greenCount = idea.counter;

Ok finally we have two separate results. The results of red and green are now separate. But, we had to know a lot about how BadIdea operated internally before the program worked didn't we? We need to remember to clone the returns every time we called it to safely make sure our results didn't get clobbered. Why is the caller forced to remember these details? Wouldn't it be easier if we didn't have to do that?

Also notice that the caller has to use local variables to remember the results so while you didn't use local variables in the methods of BadIdea the caller has to use them to remember results. So what did you really accomplish? You really just moved the problem to the caller forcing them to do more. And the work you pushed onto the caller is not an easy rule to follow because there are some many exceptions to the rule.

Now let's try doing that with two different methods. Notice how I've been "smart" and I reused those same instance variables to "save memory" and kept the code compact. ;-)

BadIdea idea = new BadIdea();
idea.findColor( Color.RED );
List<Integer> redPositions = idea.indexes;
int redCount = idea.counter;
idea.findOppositeColors( Color.RED );  // this causes red positions to be lost again!!
List<Integer> greenPositions = idea.indexes;
int greenCount = idea.counter;

Same thing happened! Damn but I was being so "smart" and saving memory and the code uses less resources!!! This is the real peril of using instance variables like this is calling methods is order dependent now. If I change the order of the method calls the results are different even though I haven't really changed the underlying state of BadIdea. I didn't change the contents of the map. Why does the program yield different results when I call the methods in different order?

idea.findColor( Color.RED )
idea.findOppositeColors( Color.RED )

Produces a different result than if I swapped those two methods:

idea.findOppositeColors( Color.RED )
idea.findColor( Color.RED )

These types of errors are really hard to track down especially when those lines aren't right next to each other. You can completely break your program by just adding a new call in anywhere between those two lines and get wildly different results. Sure when we're dealing with small number of lines it's easy to spot errors. But, in a larger program you can waste days trying to reproduce them even though the data in the program hasn't changed.

And this only looks at single threaded problems. If BadIdea was being used in a multi-threaded situation the errors can get really bizarre. What happens if findColors() and findOppositeColors() is called at the same time? Crash, all your hair falls out, Death, space and time collapse into a singularity and the universe is swallows up? Probably at least two of those. Threads are probably above your head now, but hopefully we can steer you away from doing bad things now so when you do get to threads those bad practices don't cause you real heartache.

Did you notice how careful you had to be when calling the methods? They overwrote each other, they shared memory possibly randomly, you had to remember the details of how it worked on the inside to make it work on the outside, changing the order in which things were called produce very big changes in the next lines down, and it only could only work in a single thread situation. Doing things like this will produce really brittle code that seems to fall apart whenever you touch it. These practices I showed contributed directly to the code being brittle.

While this might look like encapsulation it is the exact opposite because the technical details of how you wrote it have to be known to the caller. The caller has to write their code in a very particular way to make their code work, and they can't do it without knowing about the technical details of your code. This is often called a Leaky Abstraction because the class is suppose to hide the technical details behind an abstraction/interface, but the technical details leak out forcing the caller to change their behavior. Every solution has some degree of leaky-ness, but using any of the above techniques like these guarantees no matter what problem you are trying to solve it will be terribly leaky if you apply them. So let's look at the GoodIdea now.

Let's rewrite using local variables:

 public class GoodIdea {
   ...

   public List<Integer> findColor( Color value ) {
      List<Integer> results = new ArrayList<Integer>();
      for( int i = 0; i < map.length; i++ ) {
         if( map[index] == value ) {
            results.add( i );
         }
      }
      return results;
   }

   public List<Integer> findOppositeColors( Color value ) {
      List<Integer> results = new ArrayList<Integer>();
      for( int i = 0; i < map.length; i++ ) {
         if( map[index] != value ) {
            results.add( i );
         }
      }
      return results;
   }
 }

This fixes every problem we discussed above. I know I'm not keeping track of counter or returning it, but if I did I can create a new class and return that instead of List. Sometimes I use the following object to return multiple results quickly:

public class Pair<K,T> {
    public K first;
    public T second;

    public Pair( K first, T second ) {
       this.first = first;
       this.second = second;
    }
}

Long answer, but a very important topic.