Design Interfaces – Violating the Interface Segregation Principle

I like to interpret Interface Segregation Principle as

Interface should be closer related to the code that uses it than code that implement it. So the methods on the interface are defined by which methods client code needs than which methods class implements.

This implies that for each interface, there is always code that uses this interface. This is not the case of IConvertible. The interface itself doesn't make much sense. I also never saw property or function that was typed IConvertible, which empowers my claims. I even wonder how would code that only works on IConvertible looks and what would it do.

In many cartoons or other media, the forces of good and evil are often illustrated by an angel and a demon sitting on the character's shoulders. In our story here, instead of good and evil, we have SOLID on one shoulder, and YAGNI (You ain't gonna need it!) sitting on the other.

SOLID principles taken to the max are best suited for huge, complex, ultra-configurable enterprisey systems. For smaller, or more specific systems, it is not appropriate to make everything ridiculously flexible, as the time you spend abstracting things will not prove to be a benefit.

Passing interfaces instead of concrete classes sometimes means for example that you can easily swap reading from a file for a a network stream. However, for a great amount of software projects, that kind of flexibility is just not ever going to be needed, and you might as well just pass concrete file classes and call it a day and spare your brain cells.

Part of the art of software development is having a good sense of what is likely to change as time goes on, and what isn't. For the stuff that is likely to change, use the interfaces and other SOLID concepts. For the stuff that won't, use YAGNI and just pass concrete types, forget the factory classes, forget all the runtime hooking up and configuration, etc, and forget a lot of the SOLID abstractions. In my experience, the YAGNI approach has proven to be correct far more often than it is not.