To what degree should you keep your data private? No, I'm not talking about the societal and security concerns of your personal data, but about your code: to what extent are the incidental decisions of data representation in one piece of visible to another piece of code?

In theory, the widespread adoption of languages with support for object orientation and modules should have made developers aware of the practice and benefits of information. In practice, most code makes incidental choices highly visible across codebases, with getters and setters for every field and public properties that might as well be public fields.

This talk takes a lot of what data abstraction is, its history, its application, its appearance across different programming paradigms, its relevance in software architecture, dependency management, Domain-Driven Design, APIs and agile development.