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

The GoF (and many others) recommend that you only favor composition over inheritance. If you have a class with a very large API, and you only want to add a very small number of methods to it, leaving the base implementation alone, I would find it inappropriate to use composition. You'd have to re-implement all of the public methods of the encapsulated class to just return their value. This is a waste of time (programmer and CPU) when you can just inherit all of this behavior, and spend your time concentrating on new methods.

So, to answer your question, no you don't absolutely need inheritance. There are, however, many situations where it's the right design choice.