On 31 août 05, at 00:48, Blake wrote:

> 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).

thanks this is nice to see that people think that way.


> 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===
>
>