Same, I always remember this with interfaces and inheritance, shoehorned in BS where I’m only using 1 class anyway and talking to 1 other class what’s the point of this?
After I graduated as a personal project i made a wiki for a game and I was reusing a lot of code, “huh a parent class would be nice here”.
In my first Job, I don’t know who’s going to use this thing I’m building but these are the rules: proceeds to implement an interface.
When I have to teach these concepts to juniors now, this is how I teach them: inheritance to avoid code duplication, interfaces to tell other people what they need to implement in order to use your stuff.
I wonder why I wasn’t taught it that way. I remember looking at my projects that used this stuff thinking it was just messy rubbish. More importantly, I graduated not understanding this stuff…
I wouldn’t say that inheritance is for avoiding code duplication. It should be used to express “is a” relationship. An example seen in one of my projects: a mixin with error-handling code for a REST service client used for more than one service has log messages tightly coupled to a particular service. That’s exactly because someone thought it was ok to reuse.
In my opinion, inheritance makes sense when you can follow Liskov’s principle. Otherwise you should be careful.
Same, I always remember this with interfaces and inheritance, shoehorned in BS where I’m only using 1 class anyway and talking to 1 other class what’s the point of this?
After I graduated as a personal project i made a wiki for a game and I was reusing a lot of code, “huh a parent class would be nice here”.
In my first Job, I don’t know who’s going to use this thing I’m building but these are the rules: proceeds to implement an interface.
When I have to teach these concepts to juniors now, this is how I teach them: inheritance to avoid code duplication, interfaces to tell other people what they need to implement in order to use your stuff.
I wonder why I wasn’t taught it that way. I remember looking at my projects that used this stuff thinking it was just messy rubbish. More importantly, I graduated not understanding this stuff…
I wouldn’t say that inheritance is for avoiding code duplication. It should be used to express “is a” relationship. An example seen in one of my projects: a mixin with error-handling code for a REST service client used for more than one service has log messages tightly coupled to a particular service. That’s exactly because someone thought it was ok to reuse.
In my opinion, inheritance makes sense when you can follow Liskov’s principle. Otherwise you should be careful.
What no, inheritance is not for code sharing
Sound bite aside, inheritance is a higher level concept, and that it “shares code” is more of a side effect.
The simple, plain, decoupled way to share code is the humble function call, i.e. static method in certain langs.