[repsilat]

Mm. For me there are only a few reasons to use inheritance:

- Common operations between classes, operating on common data, but requiring an external API (so composition is a pain because you would have to proxy those actions to the member.)

- Restricting/specifying the types of objects you can store in a container if you are programming in a language/codebase that cares about that (incl. the C++ "definitely has the vtable I want".)

And maybe that's it? I guess all the taxonomy talk might be useful in the first hour of learning about inheritance, but after that I think the analogy should give way to more concrete "what are the code and data doing?" angle.

[humbleMouse]

I agree. Inheritence is useful in a very small amount of situations and can be the start of a long abstract chain of bullshit if other devs are allowed to build more funtionality on top...

[ninkendo]

I’ve only ever seen inheritance make sense in UI toolkits. That’s literally it.

It’s like if someone took the cascading idea of CSS and decided “this works so well for UI styling, let’s build a language paradigm out of it and convince people they need to express every problem in terms of it.”