I've come to the conclusion that in most languages we refer to as object oriented today, we probably shouldn't use inheritance at all. In Smalltalk it was a way

I've come to the conclusion that in most languages we refer to as object oriented today, we probably shouldn't use inheritance at all. In Smalltalk it was a way to make generic behavior available to all objects. The prototype chain in Self was the for the same reason. If you're writing a language that doesn't expose that machinery (which lets you reprogram the runtime), I've found that inheritance is usually a poor choice. Yes, Python programmers, I'm saying that you should never use inheritance unless you're doing metaclass programming.