I'm actually quite surprised by some of the discussion here. I'm not surprised people are skeptical; this is a good thing. But I'm a little surprised by the defense of inheritance and by things "being good enough because they work now". I mean, to me, Smalltalk has always been about ideals. Sure, things that work "well enough" should be at the bottom of everyone's list of things to break, but the flaws in the collection hierarchy are obvious--even if we've all managed to work around them (or not conern ourselves with them).
As for defending inheritance, I learned about OO programming back in 1990. A johnny-come-lately, I guess, since I'd been programming for ten years and (in lieu of any formal training or knowledge of internet) struggling to come up with systems of expressions in traditional languages that would give me just a fraction of what OOP did. And yet, within weeks of learning OO, the limitations of inheritance were apparent even to me. Yeah, you can almost always insert a feature at the highest point in the hierarchy you need it, but then you end up with big, fat objects stuffed with lots of unused code. It's inelegant, it's wasteful and--in the case of collections--it leads to code duplication. It also strikes me as a security hazard.
Is any of this seriously debated? I mean, traits notwithstanding, has anyone who has ever built a large hierarchy of objects NOT run into the above problems?
===Blake===