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Discussion on: A Pythonic Guide to SOLID Design Principles

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joolius profile image
Julius

I am not sure if I understand the example used for LSP.

You may have noticed all of the FTP client classes so far have the same function signatures. That was done purposefully so they would follow Liskov's Substituitability Principle. An SFTPClient object can replace an FTPClient object and whatever code is calling upload, or download, is blissfully unaware.

SFTPClient requires username and password, whereas FTPClient does not. In the calling code I cannot replace FTPClient(host=host, port=port) with SFTPClient(host=host, port=port), so I do not see how SFTPClient can be a substitute for FTPClient. Could you please explain?

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ezzy1337 profile image
Derek D.

Thanks for pointing it out. I've fixed it.

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ezzy1337 profile image
Derek D.

Great question! I had to look up Liskov's again to make sure this example was still valid. Fortunately for me, and quite by accident, I think it still works. Let me try to explain.

Liskov's as it originally appeared states, "Let Φ(x) be a property provable about objects x of type T. Then Φ(y) should be true for objects y of type S where S is a subtype of T." So I took this as the principle applies to objects, not classes. In general, I think most people agree. So a class has a constructor which returns an object and as long as the object returned by the constructor can replace an object of the parent type you are following Liskov's.

All that being said with higher-level languages like Python it's probably a better practice to follow Liskov's even with the constructor since we can pass a Class name to a function and then construct an object of that class inside the function. In that scenario what I've written in this article would absolutely blow up.

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joolius profile image
Julius

Thank you for the explanation!

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irunatbullets profile image
irunatbullets

I had to look up Liskov's again to make sure this example was still valid.

This is actually my biggest issue with SOLID. Having to look it up. After reading the Zen of Python at the top of the article, it feels easier because it's a mindset.