Law of Demeter - Disadvantages

Disadvantages

At the method level, the LoD leads to narrow interfaces, giving access to only as much information as it needs to do its job, as each method needs to know about a small set of methods of closely related objects. On the other hand, at the class level, the LoD leads to wide (i.e. enlarged) interfaces, because the LoD requires introducing many auxiliary methods instead of digging directly into the object structures. One solution to the problem of enlarged class interfaces is the aspect-oriented approach, where the behavior of the method is specified as an aspect at a high level of abstraction. This is done by having an adaptive method that encapsulates the behaviour of an operation into a place, with which the scattering problem is solved. It also abstracts over the class structure that results in avoiding the tangling problem. The wide interfaces are managed through a language that specifies implementations. Both the traversal strategy and the adaptive visitor use only a minimal set of classes that participate in the operation, and the information about the connections between these classes is abstracted out.

Since the LoD exemplifies a specific type of coupling, and does not specify a method of addressing this type of coupling, it is more suited as a metric for code smell as opposed to a methodology for building loosely coupled systems.