Programming: Design

SOLID Design Principles

https://stackify.com/interface-segregation-principle/

enum vs object

Pros/Cons

• enums are better than magic-numbers (less misleading)
• enums may lead to duplicated conditionals (leading to shotgun-surgery)

• injected-objects can fully encapsulate a behaviour (no conditionals)
• injected objects are more intimidating to users (requires reading, finding, satisfying injected obj deps)

Strategy
use enums

• to represent related objects that do not imply specific behaviour (ex: weekdays)
• for data that gets serialized (where behaviours cannot be encoded)

use injected-objects:

• everywhere else
  • better for testing
  • better for flexibility
  • better for introducing new behaviours without introducing breaks

Exceptions

• beginner-friendly directing users to use other objects can be tricky. In this instance, I'll create the self-encapsulating object (still simplifies testing), but accept a string value as well. It is not perfect, but it should keep everyone happy.

See Also

• https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/211811/in-what-situations-does-it-make-sense-to-use-an-enumeration-when-writing-object