I recently encountered a situation in some code I am working on that doesn’t make sense to me. A set of classes are inheriting from a base class purely to share some methods in the base class. There is no method overriding, just child classes calling methods from the parent class.
It seems to me that this would be better modeled by having the child classes reference the parent class rather than inheriting from it, which I think would reduce unnecessary complexity. Is this reasonable, or am I missing some benefit of using inheritance like this?
If the parent class methods are there purely as ‘utilties’ then yes, I agree.
The question (for me at least), would be if the parent class could be modified in the future to have benefit. Meaning, what is the current relationship logically? If it’s an “is a” between child and parent then leave it. If the parent is just a collection of methods, refactor to a utility class or use delegation.