Taxophobia: the fear of class-ification

My workplace is being overrun by taxophobics or classphobics - those who believe it to be expensive to create new classes, they fear refactoring and would rather stick all their methods in one, gigantic, manager class.

A taxophobic would rather have a single class with 5 similar sounding methods than 5 classes sharing a common interface with one method in it.

A taxophobic believes that there is some inherit cost in creating new files; they're self appointed byte-conservationists.

Taxophobics will try to convince you of their infantile designs based on an argument of "pragmatism". "Refactoring" is a dirty word. They love static methods and they hate unit-testing.

I've been facing an uphill battle trying to convince these people that that doing something like this :


Validator.validateX();
Validator.validateY();
Validator.validateZ();
Validator.validate....();


would be much better replaced with something more generic :


for(Validator v : validators){
v.validate();
}


But you know what ? I realised that you can't argue with these people because they have no sense of style. They've got no hope either because you can't be taught style.

My belief is that you can't have style forced on you, you've got to come to your own enlightenment, your own epiphany, though I hope I'm wrong.