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Comment by bowsamic | Hacker News Reader

Inheritance is just a total mess. Overriding a method, especially a non-abstract one, feels more like monkeypatching. It feels unsafe, it's not clear if I should do it, etc. A lot of Apple APIs mark which methods should be overridden and which shouldn't be. It just generally feels like a crappy approach. Languages with deep inheritance trees like Ruby and Smalltalk and even Objective-C are also extremely difficult to learn how to use due to how much basic functionality of the object comes from far up the chain. Remember when Steve Jobs wanted people to make companies that just sell objects? Sounds like my worst nightmare. I don't see why Rust's dynamic traits, or just duck typing, aren't totally superior

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The user you responded to uses C#, you can't override arbitrary methods there. Only methods explicity declared as virtual can be overriden, so this is different than many other OO languages.

I think this is also the better approach, making inheritance something you have to explicitly design for instead of a way to monkeypatch almost everything.

> Only methods explicity declared as virtual can be overriden

You can with "new", no?

    public class Foo
    {
        public void Say() { Console.WriteLine("Foo!"); }
        public void Think() { Console.WriteLine("I;m thinkin about thos beans");
    }

    public class Bar : Foo
    {
        new public void Say() { Console.WriteLine("Actually, Bar!"); }
    }

So with Bar we have inherited Think(), but have overridden Say(). Ok technically the MSDN docs will say that we've "hidden" the inherited method Say(), but the effect here is that we've overridden something not marked "virtual"

edit: Oops yeah I'm talking rubbish, see replies for more info :D

No, that’s not how new works. Any method in the base class will still call the “hidden” method.

https://dotnetfiddle.net/zcVPof

Ah yeah you're right :)

Using new is still very different from using override, there are real differences in behaviour there. Though I never used "new", it's usually described as a really bad idea unless you know what you're doing, I never saw the need to use this.

Isn't that shadowing instead of inheritance ?

Wow that's very interesting, and much better

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