If Inheritance is so bad, why does everyone use it? (buttondown.email)

submitted 1 year ago by armchair_progamer@programming.dev to c/programming_languages@programming.dev

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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.

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[-] porgamrer@programming.dev 4 points 1 year ago

It does frustrate me that people say "composition over inheritance" and then act like the problem is solved.

For a start, dependency injection is an abomination. Possibly the single worst programming paradigm in the history of software development.

The only codebases I've seen that deliver on some of the promises of composition have been entity-component systems, but this concept hasn't even matured to the point of being a first-class language construct yet, so the programming style is pretty janky and verbose.

[-] balder1993@programming.dev 8 points 1 year ago

dependency injection is an abomination

I don’t think so, dependency injection has made testing easier in all static typed code bases I worked on.

[-] FunctionalOpossum@programming.dev 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

The general idea is to not test things that need to be mocked, keep all logic out of those and keep them at the edges of the application. Then you test the remaining 90% of your code which would ideally be pure functions that don't need mocks .

The remaining 5% can be integration tests which doesn't care about DI.

In reality this doesn't always work, because sometimes it's better to write a complex query with logic and let your database do the processing.

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this post was submitted on 11 Apr 2024

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Programming Languages

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