In object-oriented software design, there are often discussions as to how to address some problems by using the main ideas of the paradigm (polymorphism, inheritance, and encapsulation).

Probably the most commonly used of these ideas is inheritance—developers often start by creating a class hierarchy with the classes they are going to need and decide the methods each one should implement.

While inheritance is a powerful concept, it does come with its perils. The main one is that every time we extend a base class, we are creating a new one that is tightly coupled with the parent. As we have already discussed, coupling is one of the things we want to reduce to a minimum when designing software.

One of the main uses developers relate inheritance with is code reuse. While we should always embrace code reuse, it is not a good idea to force our design to use inheritance to reuse code just because we get the methods from the parent class for free. The proper way to reuse code is to have highly cohesive objects that can be easily composed and that could work on multiple contexts.