Most of us have bad memories of over-complex hierarchies we regret seeing, but this is probably due to the dominance of OOP in recent decades.

This sentence here is why inheritance gets a bad reputation, rightly or wrongly. Inheritance sounds intuitive when you’re inheriting Vehicle in your Bicycle class, but it falls apart when dealing with more abstract ideas. Thus, it’s not immediately clear when and why you should use inheritance, and it soon becomes a tangled mess.

Thus, OO programs can easily fall into a trap of organizing code into false hierarchies. And those hierarchies may not make sense from developer to developer who is reading the code.

I’m not a fan of OO programming, but I do think it can occasionally be a useful tool.