It actually is the consensus in the OOP world these days that composition is preferable to inheritance in most cases.
Declaring class inheritance to be the defining feature of OOP just because it was fundamental to 1990s Java courses makes about as much sense as to say extreme late-binding is a fundamental aspect of OOP, like Alan Kay does, and thus neither Java nor C++ are OOP languages. Yippee! Suddenly they are no longer boring, old OOP anymore either! Thanks Alan!
You mention FP being a broad category. Indeed it is. Haskell is all about expressive static types, meanwhile Erlang couldn't care less about types. Yet I dare to argue that this broad definition is not "useless" because both Erlang and Haskell default to immutable data and pure functions, and that defines FP more than anything.
Practically meaning that Erlang and Haskell tend to be massively closer to each other than they are to imperative languages.
The same is the case here. Rust is massively closer to C++ than to Haskell. Mutable ADTs+methods+interfaces, as opposed to free functions and (immutable) "raw" data defines the code style way more than questions like subtype vs. parametic polymorphism
If you think that the fact that your dog does not "inherit" from mammal but instead has the mammal "trait", means you are doing a fundamentally different kind of programming, you are wrong. Such differences are of lesser importance in practice.
> It actually is the consensus in the OOP world these days that composition is preferable to inheritance in most cases.
No argument there. :)
> Yet I dare to argue that this broad definition is not "useless" because both Erlang and Haskell default to immutable data and pure functions, and that defines FP more than anything.
I think this illustrates what I'm trying to get at: if one's task is to further the tenets of functional programming, then going around espousing "functional programming" as a general concept is less direct than just cutting to the chase and evangelizing for immutability and/or purity directly, especially when one considers that e.g. Common Lisp is neither immutable nor pure, but will be what plenty of people's minds jump to when they think of FP.
Declaring class inheritance to be the defining feature of OOP just because it was fundamental to 1990s Java courses makes about as much sense as to say extreme late-binding is a fundamental aspect of OOP, like Alan Kay does, and thus neither Java nor C++ are OOP languages. Yippee! Suddenly they are no longer boring, old OOP anymore either! Thanks Alan!
You mention FP being a broad category. Indeed it is. Haskell is all about expressive static types, meanwhile Erlang couldn't care less about types. Yet I dare to argue that this broad definition is not "useless" because both Erlang and Haskell default to immutable data and pure functions, and that defines FP more than anything.
Practically meaning that Erlang and Haskell tend to be massively closer to each other than they are to imperative languages.
The same is the case here. Rust is massively closer to C++ than to Haskell. Mutable ADTs+methods+interfaces, as opposed to free functions and (immutable) "raw" data defines the code style way more than questions like subtype vs. parametic polymorphism
If you think that the fact that your dog does not "inherit" from mammal but instead has the mammal "trait", means you are doing a fundamentally different kind of programming, you are wrong. Such differences are of lesser importance in practice.