Ever feel like you finally understand something, only to have the internet gleefully tear that understanding to shreds? That’s the vibe right now for anyone who’s ever proudly declared their code followed the SOLID principles.
Over on Reddit, a quiet rebellion is brewing. A post is gaining traction that essentially says, “SOLID? Nope, just Coupling and Cohesion.” The argument is that those five fancy letters—Single Responsibility, Open-Closed, you know the rest—are really just elaborate disguises for two core, much-less-intimidating concepts: keep things loosely connected and tightly focused within themselves. The comment section is a mix of software engineers having existential crises and nodding in relieved agreement.
It’s funny because it’s like watching someone point out that the emperor’s new clothes are, in fact, just a very detailed pamphlet about the benefits of wearing fabric. We’ve been having solemn conferences and drawing intricate diagrams around these capitalized commandments, and a bunch of programmers on Reddit are like, “Hey, maybe it’s just about not making a giant spaghetti ball of code.” It’s the programming equivalent of realizing your fancy diet is just “eat food, not too much, mostly plants.”
This trend is also a beautiful example of internet culture cutting through the jargon. It takes something that sounds like a corporate training seminar and boils it down to a meme-friendly, two-word roast. You can almost hear the collective “ohhhh” from junior devs everywhere, who can now ignore the intimidating acronym and just ask themselves, “Is this chunk of code trying to do too much, and is it way too clingy with the other chunks?”
At the end of the day, whether you’re a SOLID purist or a Coupling-and-Cohesion rebel, the joke’s on all of us for ever thinking software design could be simple. But maybe, just maybe, the real SOLID principle was the friends we decoupled from along the way.
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