I don't think that it really is a useful enough definition. There are lots of ways to glue things together that aren't inheritance that are very different from each other.

I could compose functions together like the Haskell `.`, which does the regular f(g(x)), and I don't think anyone disputes that that is composition, but suppose I have an Erlang-style message passing system between two processes? This is still gluing stuff together in a way that is not inheritance, but it's very different than Haskell's `.`.

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hansvm 5 hours ago | parent [-]

But both of those avoid the pitfalls of inheritance. "Othering" is a common phenomenon, and I think it's useful when creating an appropriate definition of composition.

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tombert 5 hours ago | parent [-]

But I don't think it's terribly useful; there are plenty of things that you could do that the people who coined the term would definitely not agree with.

Instead of inheritance, I could just copy and paste lots of different functions for different types. This would be different than inheritance but I don't think it would count as "composition", and it's certainly not something you should "prefer".

	▲	hansvm 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		That's fair. I'd agree that isn't composition. I'm not sure the thing you describe is worse than inheritance.... It's not composition though.