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by alerighi 1265 days ago
To some problems that are almost always seen in the academic world but I've yet to see in my daily job.

Inheritance (from implementation, I've nothing against implementation of interfaces or inheritance from abstract base classes) has a ton of problems, more importantly the fact that it makes the code more difficult to understand and to evolve.

Composition on the other hand is something more natural, even if we think about real life: you don't usually take an object and "extend" it, you take multiple object and use them together to build something!

2 comments

It's strange that you seem to be an absolutist on this topic. What is wrong if inheritance is an elegant solution to a relatively small number of problems? Historical overuse of inheritance doesn't take away from that.
What problem is left? UI? React is showing composition wins there too.
It's just a code reuse mechanism. In some cases you can do with it what you might also do with callbacks, or yes, composition. Or in some cases inheritance might be handy.

I don't know why we need to be so judgmental about it.

I think inheritance is especially good if you have an interface (in the OO sense, like some languages use an "interface" keyword for), but you have some common or default methods, which a specific implementation may or may not override, or maybe there is some boiler plate or tedium where the most common implementation might belong in a base class. I think this is handy for something like a device driver.

  > has a ton of problems
this may be a good reference with examples (and some good dose of nuance) on the subject:

https://blog.gougousis.net/oop-inheritance-what-when-and-why...