In response to my recent blog posting Immutable Java Objects, Matt brought up a good point of discussion related to making Java classes truly immutable by declaring them as final so that they cannot ...

Immutability is a feature of functional programming languages that makes programs easier to write, test, and maintain. However, immutability is not supported by many imperative programming languages.

In a previous column I discussed all the reasons for creating read-only objects and how they could simplify your applications (in fact, I recommended that creating a read-only object should be your ...