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Primitive Obsession is a code smell where primitives like strings and integers are overused to represent complex concepts such as email addresses, phone numbers, and unique IDs. This leads to issues like weak type checking, poor readability, code duplication, and difficulty in refactoring. The post discusses the drawbacks of primitive obsession and offers strategies to design more robust data structures for better code correctness, maintainability, and data safety. It emphasizes the importance of encapsulation and being vigilant about special validation, comparison, and formatting rules for variables.

What is Primitive Obsession?

How to Break Away from Primitive Obsession

It took me some time to try and figure out what the author is trying to hit home with. Because his opening argument is flawed.
<blockquote>
In a statically-typed language like Java, C#, Go, Typescript, or even Dart, how do you represent an email address? Okay, what about a password? A phone number? Zip code? Home address? Alright, what about a unique ID?
If your answer to all or most of these is a string, then you are suffering from what Software Development experts call “Primitive Obsession”.
</blockquote>
To which I say, “No. That’s not primitive obsession. That’s calling out that almost everything can be represented by a string.” But just like you can’t add <code>&quot;7&quot;</code> and <code>&quot;9&quot;</code> and get <code>&quot;16&quot;</code>, different primitives are used for different jobs.
Except <code>float</code> in c# and Java. Everyone says “use <code>double</code>”. But that’s beside the point.
However, let’s give the author the benefit of the doubt. I think what the author is trying to convey is, “don’t store all of your application’s data in groups of unrelated primitives”. Or, what we more commonly refer to as global variables. Because tracking all of those down IS a pain in the butt and can lead to the problems he puts in the article such as weak type checking and reduced maintainability.
What is “Primitive Obsession”? I still don’t know. To me, it sounds like some individuals shortcut answer to “stop programming like it’s your first day and start using these advanced features that the language offers instead”. Which is a mouthful.

I feel like the article is misleading? My go to solution is to use primitive and wrap it up so that I don’t have to control it directly everywhere. Everything comes down to primitive eventually so tell me to stop being obsessed with primitive is kinda… odd

Since when String is a primitive type in java? :)

People here are missing the point. The author is trying to say to try to reduce (or eliminate) the usage of type-unsafe primitives such as <code>int</code>, <code>float</code>, <code>string</code> for your data. For example, if you have a Postal Code to store, don’t store it in a <code>string</code> directly. Instead, store it in a type-safe structure and hide the fact that <code>string</code> is being used internally to eventually store the postal code.