SOLID, ETC and DRY

The following notes are from Uncle Bob’s Clean Architecture and Andy and Dave’s The Pragmatic Programmer

SOLID Principles

The SOLID principles operate at the class (or class-like) level.

SRP - Single Responsibility Principle

A class has only one reason to change. The reason to change should be driven by a stakeholder or group of stakeholders that using that class in a specific way.

OCP - Open Closed Principle

Keep classes closed to change, but open for extension. When we want to extend a classes behaviour, we rely on interfaces or inheritance rather than modifying the class.

LSP - Liskov Substitution Principle

A class which depends on another classes’ interface shouldn’t know or care where in the dependencies’s inheritance heirachy it is interacting.

ISP - Interface Segregation Principle

A class which depends on another classes’ interface uses the entire interface. ISP and SRP help us draw lines where a class should be split.

DIP - Dependency Inversion

Rely on abstract interfaces rather than concrete classes. Clean Architecture mentions this is only important for volatile modules; it’s usually ok to rely on concrete classes which are unlikely to change (e.g. the standard library).

Dependency inversion is usually applied by having dependencies implement an interface; and having classes only depend on those interfaces.

ETC - Easy to Change

ETC is my favorite principle from The Pragmatic Programmer. It is the end goal; All other principles are trying to make software easy to change.

Code that is easy to change keeps software “soft”. ETC is one of a few key reasons to practice test driven development, and a big enabler for agile development.

DRY - Don’t Repeat Yourself

Don’t repeat yourself applies to reduce code smells such as ‘Duplicated Code’, ‘Shotgun Surgery’, ‘Data Clumps’ and ‘Repeated Switch Statement’.

Duplicated sources of truth are also a violation of DRY. For example, if two classes maintain a game’s Time object independently; then we have an awkward DRY violation which require both classes to be updated when we want to update time.