Tagged Questions

7
votes
2answers
266 views

How do I avoid writing lots of pass-through functions in a wrapper?

I have a class, which wraps another class of a common base type. Because the base type interface is quite large this involves writing a lot of pass-through functions. I am looking for a way to avoid ...
6
votes
4answers
542 views

Looking for a real-world example illustrating that composition can be superior to inheritance

I watched a bunch of lectures on Clojure and functional programming by Rich Hickey as well as some of the SICP lectures, and I am sold on many concepts of functional programming. I incorporated some ...
0
votes
5answers
793 views

Inheritance vs composition in this example

I'm wondering about the differences between inheritance and composition examined with concrete code relevant arguments. In particular my example was Inheritance: class Do: def do(self): ...
3
votes
7answers
592 views

Inheritance using non-abstract base class

This post is based on the question http://stackoverflow.com/questions/49002/prefer-composition-over-inheritance/11758048#comment15634305_11758048. Some people said - check whether there is “is-a” ...
2
votes
1answer
346 views

Composition vs. Inheritance

Here's what is given: public interface Request {} // there are 20 subclasses of Request public class CreateUserRequest implements Request { @NotEmpty public String userName; } // request ...
20
votes
4answers
6k views

Why should I prefer composition over inheritance?

I always read that composition is to be preferred over inheritance. A blog post on unlike minds, for example, advocates using composition over inheritance, but I can't see how polymorphism is ...
0
votes
2answers
193 views

Inheritance versus Composition in a business application

I have a training management and tracking system, with a high level structure as follows: We have a Role1, e.g. Manager, Shift-boss, miner, etc. and a Candidate, training for that Role. The role has ...
3
votes
1answer
248 views

Is it possible to refactor inheritance to composition when virtual methods are called inside the base class?

Let's say I have a class called Country and two subclasses called AI and Player. The Country class has a number of virtual methods to allow player-specific or AI-specific behavior. I want to make it ...
9
votes
5answers
942 views

How do we know to favour composition over generalisation is always the right choice?

Whether an object physically exists or not, we can choose to model it in different ways. We could arbitarily use generalisation or composition in many cases. However, the GoF principle of "favour ...
51
votes
14answers
11k views

Where does this concept of “favor composition over inheritance” come from?

In the last few months, the mantra "favor composition over inheritance" seems to have sprung up out of nowhere and become almost some sort of meme within the programming community. And every time I ...
0
votes
5answers
1k views

Why does the use of interface-based programming appear to be limited to behaviour?

I have been doing a little thinking about inheritance vs. realization vs. composition. I am not about to post the whole detail here. So I was wondering, when we are not talking about creating ...
32
votes
9answers
2k views

Code Smell: Inheritance Abuse

It's been generally accepted in the OO community that one should "favor composition over inheritance". On the other hand, inheritance does provide both polymorphism and a straightforward, terse way of ...