The Flaws of Inheritance

Let's discuss the tradeoffs between Inheritance and Composition

0:00 Introduction
0:25 Inheritance
3:32 Composition
5:22 Abstracting with Inheritance
6:52 Abstracting with Interfaces
8:20 When to use Inheritance

[NigelMelanisticSmith]

First time I've heard PNG called "ping", hits different

[jampers]

I love the 'real world' examples. Usually I'd see examples like an Animal class or Foo and Bar but these examples make it 'click' easier in my head.

[giorgosangelopoulos]

It's truly unbelievable, in 30 days with 4 videos, 100K subscribers. I have never seen anything like this before. Excellent work, keep going with these small but crucial programming details.

[nickmarsh]

I've found that tight interfaces with default implementations have provided a really nice balance between minimizing common business logic and preventing tight coupling when you lean on multiple interface implementation. It allows you to mostly lean on composition (implementing the interfaces you care about) while gaining some benefits of inheritance (common methods have a default implementation to reduce code reuse)

[jinto_reedwine]

I've been programming for over a decade and these videos explain things I already know or thought I knew in ways that make me question some of my own designs over the years! Thank you very much! I always feel like I come away from your videos with something useful to think about.

[jorgecruces]

You will be big soon, you content is just quality. Keep it up

[tobidaada]

This channel is quickly becoming one of my favorite programming-related channels. I'm sure I'm not the only one who appeciates the clear explanations coupled with beautiful animation - It's like 1brown3blue for programming.

[SmileysCinema]

In game development the most common composition pattern is called an Entity Component System (ECS). You pay a small price in object creation & destruction, but you gain optimal memory access and incredible flexibility!

It’s not immediately applicable to other disciplines of programming, but I’d still highly recommend it to everyone. It’s like the game development version of dependency injection.

[nexisle]

Bro you are a blessing. Your ability to convey the message without extra speech is a gift. Its like every word you say is useful. Thank you 🙏

[welsh_cake]

This is quickly becoming a top favourite coding channel of mine. The topics are explained wonderfully and I love the visual style. Each of these videos are so easy on the eye, easy to follow, and quick to understand. I think it's because you're to-the-point, you're demonstrating what you're talking about, as you're talking about it; and you demonstrate the importance or usefulness of what you're trying to teach, all in a way that looks beautiful. I look forward to more, they're a joy to watch.

[benstyle]

The brief animation at 5:44 does such a great job explaining the value of abstracting the contract of relationships between code!

[RomanPapush]

This is by far the best explanation of the topic I’ve ever seen. Not overly complicated, but what’s even more impressive — not unnecessarily dumbed down as well. Fantastic content.

[Filup]

I would love to see a channel like this explain to the broader community the concepts of SOLID and other principles. So wide is the gap between bad and decent code, and simple strategies to mitigate code smell and technical debt would do many wonders!

[pi-]

Loving your videos. I've been teaching myself code for a couple of years (while directly deploying my code to prod) and have been trying to get a better grasp as to what the concepts really mean. In a practical sense. You do really well at articulating these concepts in an easy-to-understand way. Can't wait for more.

[RobsonDev]

I'm sure this channel will grow exponentially in a few months. I'm happy to be here since the beginning. You are doing an amazing job both in content and visually. Thanks for sharing with us.

[first-thoughtgiver-of-will]

I did something similar recently where I wrote a trait based rust composition pattern but realized there was a common structure across all implementing classes. I made the code more succinct by creating an "optional inheritance" with its own blanket implementations so for the 99% of implementing classes you can just inherit and get the traits for free and just implement the last trait needed for integration. What makes this optional is that you can just derive the traits that are needed for the framework (requiring implementing the otherwise blanket implementations yourself) and not inherit the "helper" parent class. That way you get the best of both worlds.

[jasonpricealt]

These videos have been awesome and easy to digest. Please keep it up! I love that you have a pros and cons in all of them as well. Nothing is ever the only answer so breaking this down for people repeatedly is good. I once worked with a guy that was in school part time and anytime he would learn something new, that new thing was the best thing evarrrr and he would start implementing it in code at work without better consideration.

[penguindrummaster]

I don't know if you actually read my comment on your video "Abstraction Can Make Your Code Worse", but this is 1) so much better by not making the choice for the viewer, instead clearly stating your opinion and allowing them to come to their own conclusion and 2) an amazing companion video to the discussion around abstraction as a whole. I'm looking forward to the video on Dependency Injection, if for nothing else than because of the great quality of material and informational topics you've covered.

Keep growing, and I look forward to the next topic.

[Bracka]

I like this professional and visual representation of whatever you are trying to explain, because its really easy to understand

[Alister]

I use inheritance a lot when coding guis from scratch. All elements will share some basic functionality (such as having a position on screen, an area, the ability to draw itself, and so on) and as you develop and refine those capabilities, you want your coding to flow down to all the more specialized elements that do the same thing. When you add the ability for the element to recognize that the mouse has hovered over it for long enough to bring up popup boxes, for example, you want every element type you have to learn this ability, so you'd program it into the parent class. I can't even imagine how I'd do this cleanly and quickly without using inheritance.