“Should” is way too strong. “You should consider” is appropriate. An enum is essentially an encoding over integers. I guess this depends on your programming la

“Should” is way too strong. “You should consider” is appropriate. An enum is essentially an encoding over integers. I guess this depends on your programming language, so humour me. If you have an integer whose meaning is a category (as opposed to a count or measure) - does this need refactoring into classes? Probably not most of the time. For example you import a CSV and one of the fields is a categorisation. Let’s say county code. Your code may occasionally care if you are in an EU country. You could have a class per country and override isEU as needed but this is clumsy and ugly in my opinion. You’d also need a switch statement, in a factory method to create these from the csv data. A lot of the time it’s easier to follow code where the switch statement is in its intuitive place. Highly OO abstracted code can be very hard to reason about too.