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Comment by sisve | Hacker News Reader

Sorry, what? Is not java toghether with Ruby maybe the most hardcore OOP enthusiasts that uses inheritance for "most stuff".

Has the java culture move so far the last decade ?

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Effective Java, written by Joshua Bloch, and first published in 2001, had a very influential section called Favor composition over inheritance:

https://books.google.co.nz/books?id=Ra9QAAAAMAAJ&q=inheritan...

Why do you think DI is so prevalent in Java codebases? It's a great way of simplifying composition.

>had a very influential section called Favor composition over inheritance

The GoF book (Design Patterns) had the same, somewhere early, like in the Introduction, in 1994:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_Patterns

I’ve been writing OOP code and reading about it for a decade or two, and inheritance was identified as problematic pretty quickly. The problem today, imo, is more underuse now.

>inheritance was identified as problematic pretty quickly

Exactly what I referred to here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37539443

Yeah, it’s a bit like how the school version of lisp makes people think real lisp code bases are all lists and recursion.

Funnily enough, it actually started from C++. And, Java is so large that it is simply meaningless to talk about a unified style -- sure, some Java EE behemoth will continue to run on a complicated Application Server for decades still, churning on its workload, but so will someone write a Micronaut microservice, or something for robotics, and these will all have distinct styles.

With that said, even the Java EE/Spring complicated word has been moving towards a less inheritance-based future.

Even in Ruby, IME, deep inheritance is fairly uncommon.

Wide inheritance through mixins is common, though.

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