The Daily WTF

Inheritance is one of those object-oriented features whose importance is perhaps overstated. When I was first being introduced to OO, it was a lot of “code reuse!” and “polymorphism!” and “code reuse!” In practice, inheritance is usually a way to tightly couple two different classes and create more headaches and rework in the future.

That’s why many OO languages favor interfaces, and why the classic Gang-of-Four patterns emphasize the importance of composition in many situations. And, because inheritance can make things complicated, most languages also require single parent inheritance.

Most languages. C++, on the other hand, doesn’t. In C++, I could define a class Car, a class Truck, and then do this:

class ElCamino : Car, Truck {}

As you can imagine, this introduces all sorts of problems. What if both Car and Truck have a method with the same signature? Or worse, what happens if they have

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