As a Java engineer in the web development industry for several years now, having heard multiple times that X is good because of SOLID principles or Y is bad because it breaks SOLID principles, and having to memorize the “good” ways to do everything before an interview etc, I find it harder and harder to do when I really start to dive into the real reason I’m doing something in a particular way.
One example is creating an interface for every goddamn class I make because of “loose coupling” when in reality none of these classes are ever going to have an alternative implementation.
Also the more I get into languages like Rust, the more these doubts are increasing and leading me to believe that most of it is just dogma that has gone far beyond its initial motivations and goals and is now just a mindless OOP circlejerk.
There are definitely occasions when these principles do make sense, especially in an OOP environment, and they can also make some design patterns really satisfying and easy.
What are your opinions on this?
most things should have an alternate implementation, just in the unit tests. imo that’s the main justification for most of SOLID.
but also I’ve noticed that being explicit about your interfaces does produce better thought out code. if you program to an interface and limit your assumptions about implementation, you’ll end up with easier to reason about code.
the other chunk is consistency is the most important thing in a large codebase. some of these rules are followed too closely in areas, but if I’m working my way through an unfamiliar area of the code, I can assume that it is structured based on the corporate conventions.
I’m not really an oop guy, but in an oop language I write pretty standard SOLID style code. in rust a lot of idiomatic code does follow SOLID, but the patterns are different. writing traits for everything instead of interfaces isn’t any different but is pretty common
Yup. Embracing TDD is what made me embrace SOLID.