Friday, November 07, 2008

When to inherit, when to compose?

I suppose if you're reading this you've read some of the material out there on when to inherit, when to compose. You've also probably familiar with the "is-a", "has-a" principles...

My brother Peter, who is a dotNet programmer commented on the issue and came up with a useful principle...

Don't do it.

Or more politely... When you think you need to inherit, you pobably don't.

That is probably a good best practice approach - I need to post about best practices and why I say it's a good best practice approach. The problem is that inheritance is abused and the naive rule of "is-a", "has-a" is responsible for to many situations where inheritance is not the answer - composition would have been more than adequate and without the constraints and complexity that inheritance introduces.

It's a little like threading. If you can do it in one thread, then do it in one thread - you don't want the concurrency problems.

How important is the programming language?

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