If Inheritance is so bad, why does everyone use it?
If Inheritance is so bad, why does everyone use it?
https://buttondown.email/hillelwayne/archive/if-inheritance-is-so-bad-why-does-everyone-use-it/
Alloy Workshop There are still two slots available for the alloy workshop! I've been hard at work adding a bunch of teaching innovations to the class, which...
This essay says that inheritance is harmful and if possible you should "ban inheritance completely". You see these arguments a lot, as well as things like "prefer composition to inheritance". A lot of these arguments argue that in practice inheritance has problems. But they don't preclude inheritance working in another context, maybe with a better language syntax. And it doesn't explain why inheritance became so popular in the first place. I want to explore what's fundamentally challenging about inheritance and why we all use it anyway.