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No! This practice is absolutely terrible! Object-oriented programming _can_ allow you to make if-free programs, but it will cost you readability/maintainability. Many people have been fighting against the overuse of inheritance and oo patterns that emerged in the 90s. Do not fall in the trap again!

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I think this is (once again) just a question of finding the right balance. Using polymorphism to avoid manual conditionals is a practice that can often improve readability and maintainability. One just shouldn't drive it too far.

I do agree that people are massively overusing inheritance. In particular its often used as a means for code reuse, not for polymorphism. In most cases composition should be favored over inheritance.

Couldn't agree more.

I don't advocate a completely if-less style, but I do often grep and count ifs and elses in a code base before digging in, just to get a sense of what sort of developers have been there.

I think the if-less style is great kata material. You learn a lot when you apply it on a toy project rather than a real one. Sometimes you need to overdo things in order to understand what their limitations are.

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