Why not inherit from List?

Question

When planning out my programs, I often start with a chain of thought like so:

A football team is just a list of football players. Therefore, I should

Answer 1

What the guidelines say is that the public API should not reveal the internal design decision of whether you are using a list, a set, a dictionary, a tree or whatever. A "team" is not necessarily a list. You may implement it as a list but users of your public API should use you class on a need to know basis. This allows you to change your decision and use a different data structure without affecting the public interface.