[echelon]

Fantastic article!

Object oriented programming gets a horrible wrap on the basis of inheritance alone, and it's no wonder. Outside of limited domains, such as GUI programming, object inheritance makes little sense. Computer science students are right to question their introductory classes on inheritance when they teach contrived examples of dogs barking and cats meowing as an example of Mammal.makeSound() inheritance.

It's almost as if we're shoehorning in a code dispatch framework as a major language feature, except that framework sucks and we're stuck building with it. The best strategy working in languages with inheritance is to avoid it.

Duck typing or traits are better ways to represent polymorphic behaviors. We've known this for over a decade now.

Here's hoping that no new languages come with object inheritance as a concept. It's deader than NULL and shouldn't be resurrected.

[kaba0]

> Duck typing or traits are better ways to represent polymorphic behaviors. We've known this for over a decade now.

Any objective measure of that? Because there is a catch, we can’t do what doctors can. There are no double-blind tests for language design. All we have is empirical studies and based on that, OOP languages do objectively much better. So if anything, your exceptional claim require exceptional evidence.

But otherwise I agree that these Animal hierarchies are just dumb and many definitely overuse inheritance.

[mountainriver]

Duck typing is terrible if you want understandable code. The world has largely moved away from this for good reason.

[MaxBarraclough]

> Duck typing or traits are better ways to represent polymorphic behaviors. We've known this for over a decade now.

The trend is in the opposite direction.

TypeScript enables JavaScript programmers to benefit from static typing, and is seeing widespread use. Python now has type-hints.