use Perl

So Child inherits from Parent. Parent used some roles but, unbeknownst to me, Parent implemented some methods the roles provided, effectively hiding them. Naturally, since this is silent, I had no idea this was happening. Yesterday, in preparing to eliminate this base class, I moved those roles to the classes which actually use them. Role composition failed and I blew another large chunk of time trying to figure out what happened. It was a perfect storm of several bits of code working together in exactly the way they needed to in order to sidestep a bug. Blind luck that it had worked previously.

Fortunately, it turns out that the hidden methods were effectively no-ops and this lack of activity was hidden by our class hierarchy and simply deleting them was enough to get the code working. Otherwise, I was facing a long battle trying to figure out the right thing to do. This little time bomb has been silently hiding under the covers for a few months now.

The moral of this story: if you must use inheritance, push your roles into your concrete classes, if possible, to gain the benefits of composition conflict checks.