SOLID or COLDS? by Mark Seemann
The SOLID principles of OOD as originally put forth by Robert C. Martin make for such a catchy acronym, although they seem to originally have been spelled SOLDI.
In any case I've lately been thinking a bit about these principles and it seems to me that the Single Responsibility Principle (SRP) and the Interface Segregation Principle (ISP) seem to be very much related. In essence you could say that the ISP is simply SRP applied to interfaces.
The notion underlying both is that a type should deal with only a single concept. Whether that applies to the public API or the internal implementation is less relevant because a corollary to the Liskov Substitution Principle (LSP) and Dependency Inversion Principle (DIP) is that we shouldn't really care about the internals (unless we are actually implementing, that is).
The API is what matters.
Although I do understand the subtle differences between SRP and ISP I think they are so closely related that one of them is really redundant. We can remove the ISP and still have a fairly good acronym: SOLD (although SOLID is still better).
There's one principle that I think is missing from this set: The principle about Command/Query Separation (CQS). In my opinion, this is a very important principle that should be highlighted more than is currently the case.
If we add CQS to SOLD, we are left with some less attractive acronyms:
- SCOLD
- COLDS
- CLODS
Not nearly as confidence-inspiring acronyms as SOLID, but nonetheless, I'm striving to write COLDS code.
