[razorfen]

In the uuid case, the person had no choice. Remember, these are principles, not laws, and at some point your system is making concrete choices. Choosing UUIDs isn’t necessarily a OO design problem. He was just highlighting how expensive it can be if you require changes to your fundamental classes to extend or change behavior. In the identifier type case, it’s rare that folks abstract this stuff away. Though: I do know a LOT of systems that use synthetic identifiers for this exact purpose, as larger enterprises tend to deal with many more different identifier types from different integrations, from a DB type that can’t hold new identifiers, because IDs need to be sharper/distributed etc. So yeah, it’s a principal, and one should choose if it’s worth the upfront cost for its benefits.

OCP though more commonly refers to: 1. Building small, universally useful abstractions first 2. Extending behavior of that abstraction or system by writing new code rather than changing published code directly.

This is trivial when you have a few patterns under your belt. Template factories, builders, strategies, commands. I mean, while it’s not the best idea in most cases, even just inheriting a parent class and giving a new concrete new behavior is still better than changing something fundamental to the system.

Like has been said 999 times in this thread, software isn’t black and white. You have to make choices about where you go concrete and where you abstract, and gauge that against risk factors. A somewhat complex class you expect to go away in a couple months? Make it a god class that anyone who wants to can scan through. A fundamental class that will be used by hundreds of developers and underpin most operations in a production system where 5 minutes of downtime costs tens of thousands of dollars? It’s worth the upfront cost to build with these standards.