> most people who use inheritance directly access properties defined in a superclass i think the problem is you're both just running on anecdotes. to add fuel

> most people who use inheritance directly access properties defined in a superclass i think the problem is you're both just running on anecdotes. to add fuel to that fire: i would definitely side with jdlshore on this one. in Objective-C, for instance, you cannot even access a superclass's private properties[1]. most every team i've worked on has avoided protected properties (for languages like Java which even have them) and encouraged even subclasses to talk to their superclass via the superclass's public interface. [1] of course, you can always declare a category for the superclass which can expose whatever it wants, but subclasses are in no sense privileged in being able to do this.