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Great article.
A lot of people are on the “composition over inheritance” bandwagon now, but I’ve honestly not seen a situation where I felt that inheritance was used and was the wrong choice. (Though most of my experience is in python where there’s no diamond problem, mixin classes are common, etc)
What I noticed is that everyone seems to agree that inheriting implementation is useful, because you have that with traits in rust (which are agreed to be good, afaik), so in languages without traits, it seems reasonable to want to use the next best thing
Mixins are composition! They don’t describe what a type is (“circle” is a “shape”, etc) but rather what they can do (“circle” can have its area calculated, it can be drawn, it can be serialized, etc). Mixins in Python just so happen to be implemented by adding base classes.
Inheritance itself isn’t really a problem. It usually only matters when you have unnecessarily deep hierarchies, where a change in a base class can change functionality in dozens of classes in an unintentional way. Similarly, it can add complexity once the hierarchy is deep enough, but only really if you throw too much into the base classes.
Python’s ABCs are more of interfaces though, which is why despite Python using base classes to “inherit” them, a lot of that is really composition (or putting a class together from parts) rather than inheriting and overriding implementation details from a parent/grandparent/etc type.
My feeling was always that it was deep hierarchies that were the real problem. But people don’t always articulate it that way!
Greate writeup.
Don’t ever mention OOP during an interview. I swear it’s such an odd topic of contention, you will flat out get passed up for mentioning it in any sort of positive light.
Yet if you employ the paradigm cleanly and in the right context, devs get impressed and start borrowing designs.
So weird.
You can also just refer to the principles; at this point OOP is more of a buzzword with too much association with enterprise Java
OOP debates usually turn into inheritance vs composition which is weird because every modern used language has objects and most OOP languages lean towards composition these days.
The core OOP concepts are universal and important.
