alt Hacker NewsI happily admit it's more than possible to come up with examples that make inheritance shine. After all, that's what the authors of these books and articles do.
But most of them put the cart before the horse (deliberately design a "problem" that inheritance "solves") and don't seriously evaluate pros and cons or even consider alternatives.
Even then, some of the examples might be legitimate, and what you're referring to might be a case of one. (though I doubt there's no equally elegant and succinct way to do it without inheritance)
But none of that changes the fact that inheritance absolutely shouldn't be the default goto solution for modeling any domain it has become (and we are taught to understand it as)
or that it's exceedingly uncommon to come across situations like yours where you have 500+ shared cases of behavior and you only want to "override" 5
or that inheritance is overwhelmingly used NOT for such niche edge cases but as a default tool to model even the most trivial relationships, with zero justification or consideration
I agree that examples matter a lot, and for some reason a lot of introductory OO stuff has really bad examples. Like the whole Person/Employee/Employer/Manager dark pattern. In no sane world would a person's current role be tied to their identity--how do you model a person being promoted? They suddenly move from being an employee to a manager...or maybe they start their own business and lose their job? And who's modeling these people and what for? That's never shown. Are we the bank? The IRS? An insurance company? Because all of these have a lot of other data modeling to do, and how you represent the identities of people will be wrapped up in that. E.g.--maybe a person is both an employee and a client at the same time? It's all bonkers to try to use inheritance and subtyping and interfaces for that.
Algebraic data types excel at data modeling. It's like their killer app. And then OO people trot out these atrocious data modeling examples which functional languages can do way better. It's a lot of confusion all around.
You gotta program in a lot of different paradigms to see this.