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Programming Concepts Intermediate

What is Immutable Object?

An object whose state cannot be modified after creation, providing thread safety and predictable behavior in concurrent systems.

Immutable objects, once created, cannot have their fields changed. Any modification creates a new object instead. This eliminates a class of bugs related to shared mutable state in concurrent programs — no locks are needed because the data cannot change. In Python, tuples and frozensets are immutable. In Java, Strings are immutable. Functional programming languages (Haskell, Clojure) default to immutability. Benefits include simpler reasoning about code, safe sharing between threads, reliable hash keys, and easier undo/redo implementations. The trade-off is potential memory overhead from creating new objects for every change, though structural sharing can mitigate this.

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Hash Table
A data structure that maps keys to values using a hash function, providing average O(1) time complexity for lookups, insertions, and deletions.
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A design pattern where objects receive their dependencies from external sources rather than creating them internally.
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A methodology of twelve best practices for building modern, scalable, maintainable software-as-a-service applications.
Functional Programming
A programming paradigm that treats computation as the evaluation of mathematical functions, avoiding state changes and mutable data.
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A software development principle that aims to reduce code duplication by abstracting common patterns into reusable components.
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