Inheritance was invented as a performance hack (2021)

Post by roguecoder » Thu, May 08, 2025, 6:53 PM UTC

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #171

wolvesechoes wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"But there's a reason the crowd is moving against inheritance" Yes, in our fad-chasing industry the pendulum has moved in the other direction. Let's wait few years. There is nothing wrong with OOP, inheritance, FP, procedural, declarative or whatever. What is bad is religious dogma overtaking engineering work.

I definitely agree that the crusade against inheritance is just a fad and not based on good reasoning. Every time people say "inheritance is garbage that people only use because they learned it in school" it pains me because it's like, really? You can't imagine that it's because those people have thought about the options and concluded that inheritance is the best way to model the problem they are facing? Contrary to…

Post by roguecoder » Thu, May 08, 2025, 6:57 PM UTC

josephg wrote: post #36

osigurdson wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah ya... everyone likes to go on and on about how inheritance is the root of all evil and if you just don't use it, everything will be fine. Sorry, it won't be fine. Your software will still be a mess unless it is small and written three times by the same person who knows what they are doing. The bottom line is, no one ever really used inheritance that much anyway (other than smart people trying to outsmart themsel…

> The bottom line is, no one ever really used inheritance that much anyway If you think that, you have no idea how much horrible code is out there. Especially in enterprise land, where deadlines are set by people who get paid by the hour. I once worked on a java project which had a method - call a method - call a method - call a method and so on. Usually, the calls were via some abstract interface with a single imple…

Post by roguecoder » Thu, May 08, 2025, 7:04 PM UTC

starspangled wrote: post #109

roenxi wrote: post #10

I'm not sold the evidence is there to show inheritance is a good idea - it basically says that constructors, data storage and interfaces need to be intertwined. That isn't a very powerful abstraction, because they don't need to be and there isn't an obvious advantage from doing so over picking up the concepts separately as required. And inheritance naturally suggests grouping interfaces into a tree in the way that se…

I'm not sold on the evidence of much in the way of programming language features from the "object oriented" era. 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, obj…

Post by roguecoder » Thu, May 08, 2025, 7:11 PM UTC

phiresky wrote: post #102

virgilp wrote: post #79

I find that structural typing is the most useful thing and unfortunately few languages support it. I'd like a language where: - If I have a class Foo and interface Bar, I should be easily able to pass a Foo where Bar is required, provided that Foo has all the methods that Bar has (sometimes I don't control Foo and can't add the "implements Bar" in it). - I can declare "class Foo implements Bar", but that only means "…

TypeScript does supports all of these - `C implements I` is not necessary but gives compile errors if not fulfilled. You can use `o satisfies T` wherever you want to ensure that any object/instance o implements T structurally. To verify a type implements/extends another type from any third-party context (as your third point), you could use `(null! as T1) satisfies T2;`, though usually you'd find a more idiomatic way…

Post by RHSeeger » Thu, May 08, 2025, 7:57 PM UTC

svieira wrote: post #148

RHSeeger wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From a very modified version of something I was working on recently, but with the stuff I couldn't do actually done here (and non-functionality code because of that, but is shows the idea) public interface MetadataSource { Metadata metadata = null; default Metadata getMetadata() { if (metadata == null) { metadata = fetchMetadata(); } return metadata; } // This can be relatively costly Metadata fetchMetadata(); } publ…

One way you could fix this with composition is: class CachedMetadataSource implements MetadataSource { CachedMetadataSource(MetadataSource uncachedSource) {} Metadata getMetadata() { if (metadata == null) { metadata = uncachedSource.getMetadata(); } return metadata; } }