Are concrete parent classes a code smell?
(Back in 2003 I ran a moderately popular tech blog on the Radio UserLand platform. This is an archived version of a post from that blog. You can view an index of all the archived posts.)
Tuesday, 22 April 2003
Recently I realized that I've almost subconsciously been following a design heuristic that even I found surprising--I avoid concrete parent classes. Since coming to this realization, I've been struggling (and failing) to come up with a good case for an instantiable parent class. Is there a case for classes that are neither abstract nor final? Could concrete parent classes be a code smell?