>One of the main points of design patterns is composition over inheritance. One of the opening pages of the Design Patterns book (the GoF book) has "Prefer com

>One of the main points of design patterns is composition over inheritance. One of the opening pages of the Design Patterns book (the GoF book) has "Prefer composition over inheritance" (or words to that effect) as the only sentence on that page, right in the middle of it. My guess is that the GoF authors did that to emphasize the importance of that advice, maybe due to having seen too many brittle inheritance-laden hierarchies. I mentioned this to a client I was consulting to, a couple of years ago, after I saw that he seemed to be using inheritance too liberally, and maybe without thinking if it was needed and the right thing to use for his specific needs. He did get the point, and changed his code from then on.