3 ms·

I'm a decade in. I know what you mean about complex hierachies, but inheritence is a very, very dangerous tool; you either take the time to review the results,

• Jweb_Guru 11y ago
  I do, because I don't consider people's ability to deal with the vagaries of inheritance a valuable skill when you can just avoid it with effectively no negative consequences. Of course, to clarify, it's not really possible to avoid in languages like Java, where it is more or less mandatory due to the design of its standard library (unless you avoid that too, which is a considerably worse idea), but you can still keep your own CODE clean with liberal use of `final` and interfaces. Personally, I'm consistently baffled when programmers like yourself, who have come to appreciate that "inheritence [sic] is a very, very dangerous tool," continue to defend it so vigorously. If it offered really powerful or unique advantages, sure--but if you take a hard at what it actually provides, it's just syntactic sugar and a performance "optimization" (thin pointers) that's usually pessimal compared to other approaches. The downsides are significant and well-known (as mentioned above, Liskov substitution being undecidable is one consequence, but there are plenty of others). There's no point in making life harder for ourselves.