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If Inheritance is so bad, why does everyone use it?

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Re: If Inheritance is so bad, why does everyone use it?

#101

Post by FrustratedMonky »

Oh, darling, strap in because the Hacker News catwalk is serving us a spicy mix of opinions on inheritance in programming!

First up, we've got the crowd who treats CSS like it’s the ugly stepchild of inheritance, preaching the gospel of "composition over inheritance" as if it's the latest fashion trend.

Then there's the old guard, clutching their pearls and insisting that inheritance isn't the problem—it's just misunderstood, like a moody teenager.

Cue the functional programming aficionados, sashaying in with their "functions over classes" mantra, ready to throw shade at OOP's entire existence.

And let’s not forget the star of the show, the claim that inheritance is the VIP at the GUI and game development party, although some party poopers argue that the cool kids moved on to ECS systems ages ago.

Meanwhile, the language innovators are flaunting their Kotlin and Swift ensembles, dripping in modern features that promise to make inheritance feel so last season.

In the midst of this fashion war, there's a heated debate on whether we should be dressing our newbie programmers in OOP gowns or functional frocks from day one. And, honey, let’s not even get started on the industry’s trend chasers, who once hailed OOP as the next big thing, only to ghost it faster than you can say "blockchain."

In the end, it’s clear that in the world of programming, inheritance is either a timeless classic or a faux pas waiting to happen, depending on who you ask.

Re: If Inheritance is so bad, why does everyone use it?

#102

Post by kuang_eleven »

bedobi wrote: post #93
angiosperm wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of us have no contact with Java. But Java offers little else than inheritance to use to organize a system, so Java coders use it for everything. They are not exactly wrong, except in using Java at all. But sometimes is all that is allowed.

java offers composition, like pretty much all programming languages if you have a person class and you have students and teachers the correct thing to to is NOT to make student and teacher inherit from person it's to make student and teacher have a person attribute + the other attributes that constitute a student and teacher respectively

"correct" is certainly not the right way to put that. Inheritance and composition here are both fully valid methods for modeling the relationship, and the decision to use either should be dependent on how the models are being used and the expectation for future extension.

Re: If Inheritance is so bad, why does everyone use it?

#103

Post by constantcrying »

I think it is pretty clear that the reason inheritance is so prevalent is because it is a superficially good sounding idea, which again and again is being put in front of people.

I am sure that many, many people have had the experience of a professor tell them a nice sounding story about purely hierarchical data and went on thinking that this is the way data should be modeled.

Thankfully I believe that nowadays many people have understood what works and what doesn't work in OOP and we can actually try to get away from that model of data.

Re: If Inheritance is so bad, why does everyone use it?

#104

Post by eddd-ddde »

captainmuon wrote: post #39

I feel people don't understand what inheritance and (object orientation in general) is useful for, misuse it, and then it gets a bad reputation. It's not about making nice hierarchies of Cars, Fruits, and Ovals. For me the main point is (runtime) polymorphism. E.g. you have a function that takes a general type, and you can pass multiple specific types and it will do the right thing. And if you want to avoid huge if-e…

Except inheritance is the premature optimisation of interfaces.

Inheritance forces you to define the world in terms of strict tree hierarchies, which is very easy to get wrong. You may even do a great job today, but tomorrow such properties don't hold anymore.

Regular composition allows the same functionality without making such strong assumptions on the data you are modelling.

Re: If Inheritance is so bad, why does everyone use it?

#105

Post by constantcrying »

signa11 wrote: post #2

huh :o) the wisdom since late 90's has been to avoid it like a plague, at least in c++ circles. for example, see numerous articles in 'guru-of-the-week' by herb-sutter. the same wisdom can be applied elsewhere as well, there is no need to keep discovering the same truths in different contexts again, and again.

>huh :o) the wisdom since late 90's has been to avoid it like a plague

I am sure that hundreds of thousands of students have at some point heard that these hierarchical organization of data is how you should model a system.

Re: If Inheritance is so bad, why does everyone use it?

#106

Post by sameoldtune »

captainmuon wrote: post #39

I feel people don't understand what inheritance and (object orientation in general) is useful for, misuse it, and then it gets a bad reputation. It's not about making nice hierarchies of Cars, Fruits, and Ovals. For me the main point is (runtime) polymorphism. E.g. you have a function that takes a general type, and you can pass multiple specific types and it will do the right thing. And if you want to avoid huge if-e…

You’re describing the strategy pattern, which is probably one of the most practical coding design patterns. Ex: each chess AI difficulty gets its own class, which all extend a common interface.

Re: If Inheritance is so bad, why does everyone use it?

#107

Post by ben7799 »

I love the way people take their narrow range of experience and over generalize it to everything. Bonus points for having a blog or maybe a patreon to tell everyone how it really is.

We have a million flavors of the month but in the end it doesn't really matter. Pick a flavor and there will be teams that are successful and teams that are not. No silver bullet will make the non-successful teams magically turn into successful ones.

"I/We failed with " never generalizes to "" is bad.

Then the community constantly sits there and acts like a bunch of geniuses because some programming pattern has been discovered.. except it's 50 years old.

Re: If Inheritance is so bad, why does everyone use it?

#108

Post by sameoldtune »

eddd-ddde wrote: post #104
captainmuon wrote: post #39

I feel people don't understand what inheritance and (object orientation in general) is useful for, misuse it, and then it gets a bad reputation. It's not about making nice hierarchies of Cars, Fruits, and Ovals. For me the main point is (runtime) polymorphism. E.g. you have a function that takes a general type, and you can pass multiple specific types and it will do the right thing. And if you want to avoid huge if-e…

Except inheritance is the premature optimisation of interfaces. Inheritance forces you to define the world in terms of strict tree hierarchies, which is very easy to get wrong. You may even do a great job today, but tomorrow such properties don't hold anymore. Regular composition allows the same functionality without making such strong assumptions on the data you are modelling.

Arborescent vs rhizomatic approaches, to get philosophical.

Re: If Inheritance is so bad, why does everyone use it?

#109

Post by touisteur »

ano-ther wrote: post #70
captainmuon wrote: post #39

I feel people don't understand what inheritance and (object orientation in general) is useful for, misuse it, and then it gets a bad reputation. It's not about making nice hierarchies of Cars, Fruits, and Ovals. For me the main point is (runtime) polymorphism. E.g. you have a function that takes a general type, and you can pass multiple specific types and it will do the right thing. And if you want to avoid huge if-e…

Yes. I have a framework for an embedded system that uses various types of sensors. When changing a sensor, instead of rewriting the polling loop for every new case, I can keep looping through ‘sensor[i]->sampleNow()’ and add the specifics in a class inheriting from SensorClass.

Interface inheritance could do the trick then? Maybe function pointers even.

Re: If Inheritance is so bad, why does everyone use it?

#110

Post by danShumway »

seanwilson wrote: post #84

Nobody calls it this, but cascading styles in CSS is just like inheritance and I think should be avoided for all the same reasons. I feel it's a big part of why CSS at scale becomes unmaintainable. There isn't even a built-in way to compose two classes together if you want to avoid cascading/inheritance. It looks like composition over inheritance has caught on as the better default in other languages, but in the CSS…

I'm inclined to semi-agree with this, although I'm not sure I'd be quite as adamant about it myself. But I do generally think that CSS is taught in a way that encourages some bad practice around cascade/inheritance. I will point out though that (at least in my experience), BEM solved the majority of these problems for me even without a preprocessor. The language is definitely oriented towards inheritance/cascade, but I think there are ways to avoid it.

There's some movement towards ::part as a proposal to grant some mixin behaviors (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/::part) but I've never messed with it, and it's applicable only to shadow DOM. But mixins haven't been a huge issue for me in even enterprise-scale styling that I've done.

Opinion me, everyone has their own opinions on this, use whatever CSS style works for you. This is not me saying that BEM is the best for everyone, just giving a perspective that as someone who tends to stick to vanilla CSS and who generally kind of hates working with technologies like Tailwind or CSS-in-JS, BEM-style vanilla CSS made CSS pretty pleasant for me to work with; I have a lot more appreciation for the language now than I used to.

So if you're annoyed by CSS but also get annoyed by pre-processors or think that Tailwind is just inline CSS under a different name[0], you still don't need to be bound to the cascade -- potentially look into BEM. No technology or compilation or dependencies, it's literally just a naming convention and style guide.

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[0]: yes, I have used it extensively, please don't comment that if I used it more something would magically click, I already understand the points in its favor that you're going to comment and I've already heard the style/framework suggestions you're going to offer. It's fine if you like Tailwind, it's great if it helps you write CSS, you don't need to convince me.

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