I am not saying that inheritance is mandatory to OOP. I think "mandatory" is too strong of a word here. As I said, OOP means different things to different peopl

I am not saying that inheritance is mandatory to OOP. I think "mandatory" is too strong of a word here. As I said, OOP means different things to different people and I am okay with that. Speaking for myself, OOP is a way to orchestrate programming on a large scale. To grow software without growing the frequency, severity, and difficulty of bugs and without growing costs associated with new features is the desired result. Component-ized architecture takes great steps to achieve this result. For this reason, I view OOP as being some combination of: message passing, encapsulation, and polymorphism. I do not believe this is a complete view of OOP, nor that there is no viable alternative view of OOP.