I'll say this now.
Inheritance is the most misused capability of OOP which programmers think makes their code look smart, but most of the time just makes a giant fucking mess.
I'll say this now.
Inheritance is the most misused capability of OOP which programmers think makes their code look smart, but most of the time just makes a giant fucking mess.
In over ten years of professional programming, I have never used inheritance without regretting it.
When it's the right tool, it's incredibly useful. When it's the wrong tool, and it often is, it racks up tech debt at an incredible rate.
It works great for technical constructs. E.g. A Button is a UI element. But for anything business logic related, yeah it'll suck.
It might be nice to use in some very specific cases (e.g. addition-operation is a binary-operation AST node which is an AST node).
In most of the cases it just creates noise though, and you can usually do something different anyway to implement the same feature. For example in rust, just use enums and list all the possible cases and it's even nicer to use than inheritance.
That's wild. What did you use it for?
I LOVE TRAITS. YOU'LL HAVE TO TAKE THEM FROM MY COLD DEAD HANDS
[Insert SpongeBob screaming meme]
TRAITS ARE SO USEFUL AND STRUCTS ARE EASILY REPRESENTED IN MEMORY AND WORKED WITH, COMBINED THEY WILL TAKE OVER THE LINUX KERNEL AND THE WORLD
The venerable master Qc Na was walking with his student, Anton. Hoping to prompt the master into a discussion, Anton said "Master, I have heard that objects are a very good thing - is this true?" Qc Na looked pityingly at his student and replied, "Foolish pupil - objects are merely a poor man's closures."
Chastised, Anton took his leave from his master and returned to his cell, intent on studying closures. He carefully read the entire "Lambda: The Ultimate..." series of papers and its cousins, and implemented a small Scheme interpreter with a closure-based object system. He learned much, and looked forward to informing his master of his progress.
On his next walk with Qc Na, Anton attempted to impress his master by saying "Master, I have diligently studied the matter, and now understand that objects are truly a poor man's closures." Qc Na responded by hitting Anton with his stick, saying "When will you learn? Closures are a poor man's object." At that moment, Anton became enlightened.
Should’ve listed the source. Bad commenter.
Source: https://wiki.c2.com/?ClosuresAndObjectsAreEquivalent
(Sorry dude, my time was limited by how long I could spare poopin in-between meetings.)
Deref is for smart pointers and not for inheritance.
Let me introduce you to this horror story: Deref Polymorphism https://rust-unofficial.github.io/patterns/anti_patterns/deref.html
The windows crate is full of Deref. Because the windows API is full of inheritance.
It may not be what the trait was thought of for, but I'm glad we have it to interface with APIs that have actual inheritance.
In case anyone is wondering:

The artist is Princess Hinghoi.
Looks like some circular inheritance, that's going to cause some issues down stream.
sometimes i wonder what dignity means to certain artists
My guess is that money overwrites dignity in some cases.
Sure seems like it.
I'm taking the blonde with the succubus tattoo
Examples of inheritance hierarchies are always totally useless shit like this - what if a cow is an animal; What if a cow is a mammal, all mammals are animals and all mammals have a lactate() method?
Yeah... Wheres the AbstactAnimalFactoryManager?
Because any real life use that might come to mind would probably be related to some NDA protected database in a company.
And it is otherwise hard to think of anything at the spot, so just go with what the first example on the web-search came up with.
Entity Component System all the things!
I might write an XML ECS parser, as a joke. Practical? No! Probably even slower than the XML DOM? Yes! Funny? Yes!
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