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===