The Essence of Inheritance

TL;DR

The paper discusses the fundamental role of inheritance in programming languages as a means to enhance human understanding by facilitating the transition from concrete examples to abstract concepts.

Contribution

It highlights the conceptual importance of inheritance as a formal mechanism that mirrors human learning processes in programming language design.

Findings

Inheritance aids in human comprehension of code.

It serves as a bridge from concrete examples to abstract understanding.

Inheritance is essential for effective communication in programming languages.

Abstract

Programming languages serve a dual purpose: to communicate programs to computers, and to communicate programs to humans. Indeed, it is this dual purpose that makes programming language design a constrained and challenging problem. Inheritance is an essential aspect of that second purpose: it is a tool to improve communication. Humans understand new concepts most readily by first looking at a number of concrete examples, and later abstracting over those examples. The essence of inheritance is that it mirrors this process: it provides a formal mechanism for moving from the concrete to the abstract.