Inheritance was invented as a performance hack (2021)

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.

I think every new technology or idea is created because it solves some problems, but in the long run, we'll discover that it creates other problems. For example, transpiling javascript, C++ OO, actors, coroutines, docker, microkernels, and so on.

When a new idea appears, we're much more aware of the benefits it brings. But we don't know the flaws yet. So we naively hope there are no flaws - and the new idea is universally good.

But its rare to change something and not have that cause problems. It just always takes awhile for the problems to really show up and spoil the party. I guess you could think of it as the hype cycle - first hype, then disillusionment, then steady state.

Sometimes I play this game with new technology. "In 10 years, people will be complaining about this on hackernews. What do I guess they'll be saying about it?". For rails, people complain about its deep magic. For rust, I think it'll be how hard it is to learn. For docker, that it increases the size of deployments for no reason. And that its basically static linking with more steps.

Calling everything a fad is too cynical for me, because it implies that progress is impossible. But plenty of tools have made my life as a software developer better. I prefer typescript over javascript. I prefer cargo over makefile / autotools / cmake / crying. Preemptive schedulers are better than your whole computer freezing. High level languages beat programming in assembly.

Its just hard to say for sure how history will look back on any particular piece of tech in 20 years time. Fortran lost to C, even though its better in some ways. I think C++ / Java style OO will die a slow death, in favour of data oriented design and interfaces / traits (Go / Rust style). I could be wrong, but thats my bet.

> I think it’s obvious that anyone passing around structs that contain data and functions that act on that data is the same concept as passing around objects.

I hear what you're saying - but there's some important differences about the philosophy of how we conceptualise our programs. OO encourages us to think of nouns that "do" some verb. Using structs and functions (like C and Rust) feels much more freeform to me. Yegge said it better: https://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2006/03/execution-in-kingdo...

But lets see in 20 years. Maybe OO will be back, but I doubt it. I think if we can learn anything from the history of CS, its that functional programming had basically all the right ideas 40 years ago. Its just taking the rest of us decades to notice.

Then multiple inheritance is much cleaner because you can test constructor arguments against the union of these invariants before even hitting a constructor.

Note that I’ve never used it, but it did strike me that this was “the” way to include multiple inheritance in a language. But for some reason (run time performance maybe?) no one else seems to have done it this way.

What's described here is over-generic code, instead of KISS and just keeping an eye on extensibility instead of generalizing ahead of time. This can happen in any paradigm.

They were pushed by cultish types with little evidence. There was this assertion that all these things were wonderful and would reduce effort and therefore they must be good and we all must use them. We got object oriented everything including object oriented CPUs, object oriented relational databases, object oriented "xtUML". If you weren't object oriented you were a pile of garbage in those days.

For all that, I don't know if there was ever any good evidence at all that any of it worked. It was like the entire industry all fell for snakeoil salesmen and are collectively too embarrassed about it to have much introspection or talk about it. Not that it was the last time the industry has fallen for snakeoil...