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

submitted 7 months 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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[-] xigoi@lemmy.sdf.org 3 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

Mathematically, the union of disjoint sets is often called the sum. This is a natural name because when you look at the number of elements (or in general, any measure), it will be the actual numeric sum.

[-] onlinepersona@programming.dev 1 points 7 months ago

Why the emphasis on "disjoint"? Aren't integers a subset of floats? Would that mean then that int | float is incorrect?

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[-] xigoi@lemmy.sdf.org 4 points 7 months ago

In most programming languages, integers are not considered a subset of floats, so when you have the type Int | Float, you can distinguish 3 from 3.0.

this post was submitted on 11 Apr 2024

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