Effective Java, written by Joshua Bloch, and first published in 2001, had a very influential section called Favor composition over inheritance:

https://books.google.co.nz/books?id=Ra9QAAAAMAAJ&q=inheritan...

Why do you think DI is so prevalent in Java codebases? It's a great way of simplifying composition.

>had a very influential section called Favor composition over inheritance

The GoF book (Design Patterns) had the same, somewhere early, like in the Introduction, in 1994:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_Patterns

I’ve been writing OOP code and reading about it for a decade or two, and inheritance was identified as problematic pretty quickly. The problem today, imo, is more underuse now.

>inheritance was identified as problematic pretty quickly

Exactly what I referred to here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37539443

Yeah, it’s a bit like how the school version of lisp makes people think real lisp code bases are all lists and recursion.

Funnily enough, it actually started from C++. And, Java is so large that it is simply meaningless to talk about a unified style -- sure, some Java EE behemoth will continue to run on a complicated Application Server for decades still, churning on its workload, but so will someone write a Micronaut microservice, or something for robotics, and these will all have distinct styles.

With that said, even the Java EE/Spring complicated word has been moving towards a less inheritance-based future.

Even in Ruby, IME, deep inheritance is fairly uncommon.

Wide inheritance through mixins is common, though.