How can you balance flexibility and maintainability in OOP?

Encapsulation is another crucial concept in achieving this balance. By encapsulating the internal details of a class and exposing only essential interfaces, developers can modify the implementation without affecting other parts of the system. This promotes flexibility, allowing changes to be made within a class while maintaining a stable external interface. Additionally, encapsulation enhances maintainability by reducing dependencies and isolating potential modifications to specific areas of the codebase, simplifying troubleshooting and updates.

Abstraction is actually essential specially in large applications with many engineers working on it just to make part of your code reusable (classes, functions,..etc) without the need for other engineers to dive deep into the internal details of its implementation, however over abstracting everything does the quite opposite it makes the code base more complex and harder to document/maintain and also might affect performance. So, abstraction is essential but do not overdo it.

Balancing flexibility and maintainability in Object-Oriented Programming (OOP) involves making thoughtful design decisions to create a system that is adaptable to change while remaining easy to understand and maintain. One key principle is to design classes with a clear and single responsibility, adhering to the SOLID principles. This ensures that each class has a specific purpose, making it easier to modify or extend without affecting unrelated parts of the code. By employing interfaces and abstraction, developers can create flexible, interchangeable components that can be maintained independently, promoting a modular and scalable architecture.

In my opinion when SOLID principle are explain in theory, they appear to be very brilliant however, when it comes to coding, applying all of these principles either not possible or not feasible.

Even though there is a subject named 'design patterns', In my opinion, when you are developing your application, it is almost impossible to apply these patterns in the same way. I mean, when you are want to implement a design pattern, you actually have to alter the pattern according to your needs rather than copying previously created examples.

Despite everything, Overuse of design patterns and SOLID principles can make the code unnecessarily long and might increase complexity of architecture.