[throwaway894345]

Can you elaborate a bit? How is there coupling between a thing which uses an interface and a thing which implements the interface of the two don’t know about each other? Especially if the interface is implicit à la Go interfaces or structural subtyping?

[username90]

Every class implementing the interface needs to follow the same interface contract, that is coupling. If you want to change the interface contract for one of them you have to go and change it for all of them or you have buggy interfaces. Every time you create an interface you create a contract for it, if you have the same discipline with inheritance then inheritance isn't an issue.

The only problem with inheritance is that people can use it for classes that weren't written to be base classes, and therefore a ton of bad programmers use it for code reuse without thinking about the contract it is supposed to implement at all. With that in mind, allowing inheritance only for abstract classes isn't an issue at all.