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I always thought this was common knowledge. I guess it isn’t. The only reason inheritance continues to be around is social convention. It’s how programmers are

I always thought this was common knowledge. I guess it isn’t. The only reason inheritance continues to be around is social convention. It’s how programmers are taught to program in school and there is an entire generation of people who cannot imagine programming without it. Aside from common social practice inheritance is now largely a net negative that has long outlived its usefulness. Yes, I understand people will always argue that without their favorite abstraction everything will be a mess, but we shouldn’t let the most ignorant among us baselessly dictate our success criteria only to satisfy their own inability to exercise a tiny level of organizational capacity.

dgb23 1y ago
It's not just school. There are a lot pieces of literature, tutorials/guides, discussions, papers I came across over the years that tell you something very useful _plus_ wrap everything either into OO (or sometimes FP) noise and treat this part as just as important. Often there are vague rationales sprinkled in without much backing. So you get interfaces that are much bigger than they need to be, visitor pattern this, manager that. As someone who isn't used to OO it is sometimes difficult or cumbersome to compile these kinds of examples and explanations into its essence. I also noticed that AI assistants often want to blow up every interface with a whole bunch of useless stuff like getter/setter style functions and the like. That's obviously not the fault of these assistants, but I think it's something to consider.
goatlover 1y ago
Or because there are some situations where inheritance is useful. There was a reason Simula, Smalltalk, C++, Common Lisp (CLOS), Java, OCaml, Ruby, etc. implemented OOP. That's a lot of different languages. The program designers found it to be a useful abstraction and so did the language users. There's no reason to be dogmatic about programming abstractions. Just because OOP became dogma for a while and got abused doesn't mean we have to be dogmatic entirely in the opposite direction. Abstractions have their use for those programming languages that choose to implement them.
- austin-cheney 1y ago
  > There's no reason to be dogmatic I absolutely disagree. Some things in programming exist to bring products to market, but many things in programming only exist to bring programmers to market. That is a terrible and striking difference that results ultimately from an absence of ethics. Actions/decisions that exist only to discard ethical considerations serve only two objectives: 1) normalization of lower competence, 2) narcissism. It does not matter which of those two objectives are served, because the conclusions are the same either way.

dgb23 1y ago

It's not just school. There are a lot pieces of literature, tutorials/guides, discussions, papers I came across over the years that tell you something very useful _plus_ wrap everything either into OO (or sometimes FP) noise and treat this part as just as important. Often there are vague rationales sprinkled in without much backing. So you get interfaces that are much bigger than they need to be, visitor pattern this, manager that. As someone who isn't used to OO it is sometimes difficult or cumbersome to compile these kinds of examples and explanations into its essence. I also noticed that AI assistants often want to blow up every interface with a whole bunch of useless stuff like getter/setter style functions and the like. That's obviously not the fault of these assistants, but I think it's something to consider.

goatlover 1y ago

Or because there are some situations where inheritance is useful. There was a reason Simula, Smalltalk, C++, Common Lisp (CLOS), Java, OCaml, Ruby, etc. implemented OOP. That's a lot of different languages. The program designers found it to be a useful abstraction and so did the language users. There's no reason to be dogmatic about programming abstractions. Just because OOP became dogma for a while and got abused doesn't mean we have to be dogmatic entirely in the opposite direction. Abstractions have their use for those programming languages that choose to implement them.

austin-cheney 1y ago
> There's no reason to be dogmatic I absolutely disagree. Some things in programming exist to bring products to market, but many things in programming only exist to bring programmers to market. That is a terrible and striking difference that results ultimately from an absence of ethics. Actions/decisions that exist only to discard ethical considerations serve only two objectives: 1) normalization of lower competence, 2) narcissism. It does not matter which of those two objectives are served, because the conclusions are the same either way.