Each has its place. There's some things that inheritance makes possible, and some things that are best handled by composition. I use both, quite frequently.

It Depends™.

Composition can add a lot of complexity to a design, and give bugs a lot more corners to hide in, but inheritance can be such a clumsy tool, that it just shouldn't be used for some tasks.

That goes for almost everything in software. Becoming zealous about "The Only Correct Way" can be quite destructive.

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bccdee 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I dunno. It's easy to say, "there are trade-offs, it depends" any time two things are compared, and it's never entirely untrue. However, sometimes one option is just generally worse than the other.

I'm not saying it's malpractice to use inheritance or anything, but it's a tool I definitely hesitate to reach for. Go and Rust removed inheritance entirely, and I'd say those languages are better-off without it.

	▲	morshu9001 an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Yeah, it's like how OS war truces get proposed. "Depends entitely on the use case." Most of the time, the two arguing over Mac vs Windows or Linux distro A vs B have almost identical use cases. I haven't intentionslly used inheritance in forever, only in cases where some lib forces you to use it that way. Not cause of some trend, but it's just not something you naturally need.
	▲	ChrisMarshallNY 3 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		There’s definitely stuff that it enables. I’ve been writing software since before it was a thing, and it was almost magic, when I first learned about it. I also saw why it fell from grace, but I already knew, by then, that it was no panacea. I learned, on my own, that composition was often a better pattern, and I learned that, back in the 1980s. Not worth arguing about, but I do find absolutism to be almost offensive, and there’s a damn lot of that, in software development.
	▲	an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		[deleted]

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strix_varius 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Sure, but "favor x over y" or, put another way, "use y only if x is unsuitable" is compatible with this. Nothing in "prefer composition over inheritance" says that composition is the only correct way.

	▲	ChrisMarshallNY 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		No, but I often see folks use it as a bludgeon for dogma.

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CharlieDigital 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Same way I see it.

Objects and inheritance are good when you need big contracts. Functions are good when you want small contracts. Sometimes you want big contracts. Sometimes you want small contracts.

Sometimes the right answer is to mix and match.