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.

  • xigoi@lemmy.sdf.org
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    3
    ·
    edit-2
    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.

      • xigoi@lemmy.sdf.org
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        4
        ·
        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.