[PRL] Bob Harper's new blog

[William D Clinger]

Matthias Felleisen wrote:

> Inheritance is a static concept. How can it affect the run-time?

Inheritance creates both inclusion and ad hoc sum polymorphism,
thereby necessitating dynamic method dispatch at run time.  (There
is additional run-time overhead caused by inheritance of interfaces
and by the covariance of the array type constructor for mutable
arrays in current OO languages, which is indirectly attributable
to inheritance.)

More importantly, static concepts can be antimodular even if they
don't affect the run-time.  That's what Harper is complaining about:

On Mar 16, 2011, at 11:01 PM, Asumu Takikawa wrote:
> Quoth Bob Harper in his latest blog post:
> 
>  Worse, object-oriented programming, a species of imperative programming,
>  is fundamentally antimodular because of the absurd emphasis on
>  inheritance and the reliance on class-based organizations in which
>  functionality metastasizes throughout a program.

Will