Even when changes are going on at runtime, strings are rarely the right answer. There's a name for when this approach is taken so far as to become an antipatter

Even when changes are going on at runtime, strings are rarely the right answer. There's a name for when this approach is taken so far as to become an antipattern: stringly typed programming. [0] Typically, enums should be used in place of the way strings are used in the post. The obvious advantages of enums: they use language-level identifiers, so the language is able to check whether you're referring to something that exists. IDE autocompletion will work properly, so you won't have to memorise which strings are accepted where. Enums can also nicely leverage a static type system in languages that support it (i.e. it should be a compile-time error to try to use a member value from an irrelevant enum). Dispatching over an enum may also have performance benefits, if that matters. That said the post does mention that the strings-as-keys approach is particularly useful in hand-written parsers, which sounds like a reasonable exception. [0] https://blog.codinghorror.com/new-programming-jargon/ https://blog.codinghorror.com/new-programming-jargon/