Alloy Workshop There are still two slots available for the alloy workshop! I've been hard at work adding a bunch of teaching innovations to the class, which...

This essay says that inheritance is harmful and if possible you should “ban inheritance completely”. You see these arguments a lot, as well as things like “prefer composition to inheritance”. A lot of these arguments argue that in practice inheritance has problems. But they don’t preclude inheritance working in another context, maybe with a better language syntax. And it doesn’t explain why inheritance became so popular in the first place. I want to explore what’s fundamentally challenging about inheritance and why we all use it anyway.

  • xigoi
    3•8 months ago

    Mathematically, the union of disjoint sets is often called the sum. This is a natural name because when you look at the number of elements (or in general, any measure), it will be the actual numeric sum.

      • xigoi
        4•8 months ago

        In most programming languages, integers are not considered a subset of floats, so when you have the type Int | Float, you can distinguish 3 from 3.0.