SOLID Coding in Python

SOLID Coding in Python by Mattia Cinelli.

Download Medium on the App Store or Play Store

This was fun to read. It has some nice examples. 

I submit that the order of presentation (S, O, L, I, D) is misleading. The acronym is fun, but awkward.

My LinkedIn Learning course covers these in (what I think is) a more useful order.

1. Interface Segregation. I think this is the place to start: make your interfaces as small as possible.
2. Liskov Substitution. Where necessary, leverage inheritance.
3. Open/Closed. This is a good quality check to be sure you've followed the first two principles well.
4. Dependency Injection. This is often about test design and future expansion. In Python, where everything really happens at run time, we often fail to parameterize a type properly. We often figure that out a test time, and need to revisit the Open/Closed principle to get things right.
5. Single Responsibility is more of a summary of the previous principles than a distinct, new principle. I think it comes last and should be treated as a collection of good ideas, not a single idea.

I think time spent on the first three -- Interface Segregation, Liskov Substitution, and the Open/Closed principle -- pay off tremendously. The ILODS acronym, though, isn't as cool as SOLID.

The "Single Responsibility" suffers from an ambiguous context. At one level of abstraction, all classes have a single responsibility. As we dive into details, we uncover multiple responsibilities. The further we descend into implementation details the more responsibilities we uncover. I prefer to consider this a poetic summary, not the first step in reviewing a design.