Avoid god classes
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Revision as of 03:51, 6 October 2008 by Johannes Pagwiwoko (Talk | contribs)
A god class is a class that either know too much or does too much; a class that have to deal with too many responsibilities. The instantiated object of a god class is called a god object.
Instead of having objects collaborate and distribute data among themselves, they rely to the god object as a "centralised data center". As a consequence of this, maintenance can become difficult. The god class usually has too many number of irrelevant functions or too many global variables.
However, there is an instance in which a god class is particularly useful, where performance is needed over maintainability (eg. micro-controllers or hardware programming)