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

If your class users need all the methods and properties** List has, you should derive your class from it. If they don't need them, enclose the List and make wrappers for methods your class users actually need.

This is a strict rule, if you write a public API, or any other code that will be used by many people. You may ignore this rule if you have a tiny app and no more than 2 developers. This will save you some time.

For tiny apps, you may also consider choosing another, less strict language. Ruby, JavaScript - anything that allows you to write less code.