Is Inheritance really needed?

Question

I must confess I\'m somewhat of an OOP skeptic. Bad pedagogical and laboral experiences with object orientation didn\'t help. So I converted into a fervent believer in Visua

Answer 1

Thanks to all for your answers. I maintain my position that, strictly speaking, inheritance isn't needed, though I believe I found a new appreciation for this feature.

Something else: In my job experience, I have found inheritance leads to simpler, clearer designs when it's brought in late in the project, after it's noticed a lot of the classes have much commonality and you create a base class. In projects where a grand-schema was created from the very beginning, with a lot of classes in an inheritance hierarchy, refactoring is usually painful and dificult.

Seeing some answers mentioning something similar makes me wonder if this might not be exactly how inheritance's supposed to be used: ex post facto. Reminds me of Stepanov's quote: "you don't start with axioms, you end up with axioms after you have a bunch of related proofs". He's a mathematician, so he ought to know something.