[bigstrat2003]

Inheritance is just plain a great way to model a lot of relationships, in my experience, because a lot of things are most easily thought of as "x is a kind of y". I am perennially baffled that people shit on inheritance so much, because I think it's incredibly useful. I find myself often missing inheritance when working in Rust, for example.

[bccdee]

Implementation inheritance often leads to code that is just awful to read. If class C extends class B and class B extends class A, then to find out what `new C().foo()` actually does, you need to read through the whole C-B-A hierarchy, bottom to top. If `A.foo()` calls `this.bar()`, you have to start again, from the bottom of the hierarchy. With an inheritance hierarchy of depth n, every method call could be going any of n different places. With an interface, there's a single level of indirection. With composition, the code simply tells you what happens next.

If class A and class B both implement interface X, and B wants to borrow code from A, it should just call A's methods—ideally, static methods, but B can keep an instance of A if it wants. Explicit is better than implicit.

Also, I dislike ontological statements like "x is a kind of y." What does that mean? Typically, it's a claim about behaviour: "x offers method w and satisfies invariant v". But the actual blueprint here is an interface, (w,v)—not another object y. The waters get even muddier when we start talking about "is-a" vs "has-a" relationships. It feels like OOP is trying to unhelpfully distance us from what's actually going on with our code. Under the hood, inheritance is no more than syntactic sugar for composition. I think that OOP's focus on the ontological philosophy of inheritance is the reason why it led to so much bad AbstractObserverStrategyFactory-style code.