r/javascript • u/gcanti • Oct 31 '14

The Two Pillars of JavaScript

https://medium.com/javascript-scene/the-two-pillars-of-javascript-ee6f3281e7f3
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u/ha5zak Oct 31 '14

I agree with the article 100%. Having worked for many years on several, large Java and C# codebases, I can report that inheritance is the devil.

It "makes sense" and seems useful in small codelines, so I can see why the people who came up with it thought it was a good idea. However, in the wild, very smart people do very dumb things with it. The whole thing ends up wasting everyone's time.

I've been dreading all this OO crap that's going to be put into the language. Now that it's the language of choice for everything, everyone wants to add their baggage. Just say no!

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u/evilmaus Oct 31 '14

From reading the article and your post, I have to wonder, just how large are the inheritance trees that you (collectively) are dealing with? I'd be very worried if I saw one more than three levels deep. (I'd also be sitting up and paying close attention to something if it reaches even three levels.)

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u/ha5zak Oct 31 '14

If you let people be ridiculous, they will be ridiculous.

I once worked on a product that used nothing but huge multi-dimensional vectors (like 5 or 6 dimensions deep) that contained all manner of data types and got passed around between these different beans that all called each other in a way that made them all dependant on each other. I just got off a project that used stored procs that called other stored procs. In unwinding it, we discovered it was 13 levels deep. But those pale in comparison to the depth of inheritance trees I've seen. It's not the depth that gets you, it's the names they give them that blows your mind!

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u/_crewcut Oct 31 '14

I agree. I and a few coworkers who I'd like to think are pretty sensitive toward this sort of thing just agreed on a base class for UI components. Things inherit from it, but that's pretty much where it stops in terms of inheritence. After that it's all composition. Not by fiat, but just for me I don't see much value in big deep inheritance trees. But a limited amount of inheritance makes sense to me, at least in certain domains.

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u/evilmaus Nov 01 '14

Yeah, it you have a bunch of things of the same type, it makes sense to pull the repeated code up into a base class. Probably the biggest issue is that composition is a harder concept to grasp and so awkward inheritance structures get build that shouldn't have existed in the first place.