Why are static variables considered evil?

Question

I am a Java programmer who is new to the corporate world. Recently I\'ve developed an application using Groovy and Java. All through the code I wrote used quite a good numbe

Answer 1

Static variables are generally considered bad because they represent global state and are therefore much more difficult to reason about. In particular, they break the assumptions of object-oriented programming. In object-oriented programming, each object has its own state, represented by instance (non-static) variables. Static variables represent state across instances which can be much more difficult to unit test. This is mainly because it is more difficult to isolate changes to static variables to a single test.

That being said, it is important to make a distinction between regular static variables (generally considered bad), and final static variables (AKA constants; not so bad).