Curing Primitive Obsession with Refactoring

Have you heard of the code smell called “Primitive Obsession”?

People use int all the time. But most of the time they don’t really mean int. Usually, it’s used to represent something else: a count, an identity, whatever.

Integers are just convenient implementation mechanisms. Whatever it is that was being modeled happens to project into the integer space.

Using a primitive to model part of your domain makes code brittle and hard to read. That is Primitive Obsession.

The following video is 35 seconds long. It shows an example problem, what would be better, and part of how to fix it.