On Inheritance

The intent of this article is to contrast computer and real inheritance. Computer inheritance involves a construct that inherits the data of another – thus it is much like going from a Free to Premium version of some software service, in-that the Premium should inherit all the useful traits of the Free account without re-defining the entire subscription from scratch; wasteful when considering both time and space. In essence it is an upgrade from one state (parent) to another (child) of some thing (object) that evolves to take on more fine-grained form. Real inheritance, on the other hand, involves the passing down of some accumulate from a relative – non-exhaustively: money, personal objects of value and/or meaning, genetic features (to your advantage or disadvantage), and personal issues.

Though we may believe computer inheritance to be a simple concept, its value must be recognized. At some level, it is a memory saver in the sense that if a parent object holds data it wishes to pass along to its child, the data will be immediately accessible to the child and the data only appears once in memory for both entities rather than twice. The child need only exist, which on its own requires a small amount of space, as a real child would. Do note that as child object inherits parent, both spring into existence from a greater parent, namely the developer. In a sense, the code itself inherits its quality of design from the developer.

A child object in Java, for example, immediately inherits the parent’s data because it takes roughly no time for the parent to make the data available to the child (an inheritance time of zero from the human perspective). In reality, parents take years to accumulate their real counterpart to data, and requires a written will that may only be unveiled to the child upon death.

The utility of passing down goods and accumulate stored over a lifetime can be cherished more suddenly from the perspective of a program because it condenses the time required to pass down goods to nearly instantaneously. Ironically it is also so quick that it may be difficult to really appreciate the utility. One purpose of a child object is to better define its role relative to its parent, more exact in how it uses parent data, and can help systems achieve goals in a more eloquent way that its parents simply could not. Inheritance evolves systems, as it seems to do in life as well. The major difference in contrast to reality is computer inheritance does not span conceptual time – the parent and child are instantiated at once. The appreciation and lessons learnt from real inheritance may only come much later in life – well past the time where these lessons could have been optimally useful. We inspect these lessons in this article from the three basic verb tenses; present, past, and future inheritance.

As inheritance is a verb, it theoretically actualizes, has actualized, and will actualize at different points in time; in computer inheritance each of these occur at the same instant. In the present, we inherit some good or accumulate from some deceased relation. Thus we obtain and own these collected goods. With this we also engage with the finality of life, and in a strange way a boost of potential to our own. This is one way to observe the importance and relevance of a parent’s efforts and the deep value embedded in human life. That a single generation can propel the next with a lightening of the load. We must always appreciate the capability of humans to do such a thing, regardless of if we want to. It opens up potential avenues in life in the snap of a finger, a snap that took a lifetime to click. As the saying goes – empty stomach, one problem, full stomach, a million problems.

In the past tense, we did at some point inherit an accumulate. We can, at this point, if the span of time is long ago enough, reflect and assess the opportunities and pleasantries this has afforded us. Did we waste the previous value of a life’s worth of effort? Did we honor it? Are we better for it? Are we denying the same for the generation to come? These questions allow us to assess your ability to appreciate life that has long since past, and we should hope that it amplifies the importance of those who loved us enough to leave us something behind. That is an amalgam of incredible luck, foresight, love, consideration, and philanthropy that has somehow fallen into our lap, and has taken centuries to reach us. This phase should have us realize one important fact, that at all times we are on the bleeding edge of history, and that the efforts we make will compound over centuries, just like it took centuries for our inherited accumulate to reach us. Visualize of the death, suffering, love, and sadness that spanned the time it took for this world to reach us. That is no trivial thing. So if we decide to leave nothing behind (in the sense of not pouring helpful energies into the humans with whom we share this world), we will effectively out the compounding effect of inheritance. If we all decided on this mistaken path, we would not be here in our present form. Think of the implications of this.

The final perspective is future inheritance. It provides uncertainty as it hinges on our behavior towards relations… Either they will remove us from their will, or add us to it. The point is our future potential for expansion (from this source) is somewhat related to our decisions in life, and on the relation’s view of us – two things that are definitely not the same. We will never know unless explicitly told whether we have some fortune or accumulate to receive. And thus it can also be used as a weapon to emotionally hurt us. A parent or grandparent will do such things – something that has happened to me personally – because of the unfolding of some event that assumes your hand in its cause. The relation(s) will play conservative in this judgement and over-approximate your involvement because being wrong about you (say you are actually largely innocent in the event) and not giving you their lifetime of effort is a better alternative to hoping you didn’t have involvement and giving you a piece of it. Inheritance may reveal those who trust us to carry their life’s potential forward – on the other hand it could act as a litmus test to indicate that we need to reflect on our behavior(s).

Inheritance is usually framed as something only available to the well-off, but truth be told our aim should be to reach a point where we can all pass down the energies we’ve transmuted into potential… No matter how large or insignificant the sum of the value of the goods passed down, it is essential to do so.

To conclude, the major difference between computer and real inheritance is that the latter is personal and the former is pragmatic. It reveals to us that we gain more freedom to build systems from the pragmatism of computer inheritance because it does not come with emotional service and asterixis – yet we completely lack the dance of life, love, care, and the transmutation of energy and accumulate into additional life potential.

The lesson here is that as a programmer, we inhabit and develop systems that draw parallels from life to formulate constructs that are graspable for writing programs effectively – inheritance is an example of this though there are more: “trees”, “bags”, “overriding”, “overloading”, “returns”, “inputs”, “outputs”, “lists”, “grammar”, “syntax”, “cuts”, “slices”, “hashes” (to-chop) to name a few. They envelop us in a world where pragmatism takes center stage. It is an implicit and unintentional side-effect that we begin to expect this same pragmatism in life if we are unconscious of it. Life isn’t modular, rarely pragmatic, almost never instantaneous, often fails to live up to our exact needs, and is seldom able to “just work”. Keep this in mind when software stalls or fails to satisfy your expectations – the reason for your frustration is likely to be rooted in the very same expected pragmatism that developers leverage to create these products. As developers and consumers of developed products, we steep ourselves in pragmatic response to achieve goals quickly and effectively, but we often forget to dissociate that pragmatism when it comes to dealing with reality.