I seem to remember the Martin Fowler advice that this apparently cited being slightly more nuanced, and it’s not totally wrong. If you have a simple enumerator

I seem to remember the Martin Fowler advice that this apparently cited being slightly more nuanced, and it’s not totally wrong. If you have a simple enumerator and many switch statements depending on it then it is quite error prone if you have to add a value (depending on your language it may even be a silent failure), but a class will force you to implement the bits of behaviour you need as methods, and gives a good template for when you add another subclass. It’s not always the right thing to do, you’re trading the flexibility for others to add new types for the old flexibility of it being easy to add new behavioural decision based on a fixed set of types. I think in a lot of cases it’s definitely worth stopping and thinking, and making sure you are implementing the right thing if you find yourself using enums heavily, or using a class hierarchy as an enumerator replacement.