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by dion.
Original Post: AOP Kata: Favour OO
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We have learned to teach OO programmers to Favour Composition. Why do we do this?
Because inheritance is bad?
Of course not. inheritance is a very powerful design tool at our disposal. If you imagine taking it away from your arsenal (not the damn English football team that I dislike ;) ) you would see people weeping.
When inheritance fits a problem it is elegant and beautiful to behold. If you had to use another technique it would feel like a hack. That is how you will feel if you learn to use AI techniques and they were suddenly taken away.
The problem is that when you use these powerful tools for evil instead of good, then you end up with a grimace. A crazy inheritance hierarchy is an incredibly brittle software design, and will constrain you.
Human nature is to play with the new shiny toy (well for some people. The cynics just complain in the corner). You have to make sure that the toy doesn't overwhelm you and influence your design decisions. If inheritance doesn't feel right.... don't do it!
So, back to Favouring Composition. By planting this seed into a developers mind, they will hopefully think for another nanosecond before they make the Car extend Engine, just because they want to get some of the methods for free.
Thus, my mantra to myself is Favour traditional OO interfaces when designing with AI in my kit bag. With this seed I stop myself from jumping to the oh this would be fun if I wrote an uber-aspect which could do X, Y, and Z!. It doesn't mean that I won't use AI techniques when the shoe fits though... and when they DO fit, man are they warm and comfy slippers.
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