Avoid god classes

A god class is a class that either knows too much or does too much; a class that has 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).

God class/god object is a known software design antipattern.

See also

• Single responsibility principle
• Separation of concerns
• Model the real world
• One key abstraction
• Antipatterns