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Reportedly, Java inventor James Gosling has spoken against implementation inheritance, stating that he would not include it if he were to redesign Java.cite-ref-holub-20-2[19] Language designs that decouple inheritance from subtyping (interface inheritance) appeared as early as 1990;cite-ref-22[21] a modern example of this is the Go programming language.

Complex inheritance, or inheritance used within an insufficiently mature design, may lead to the yo-yo problem. When inheritance was used as a primary approach to structure programs in the late 1990s, developers tended to break code into more layers of inheritance as the system functionality grew. If a development team combined multiple layers of inheritance with the single responsibility principle, this resulted in many very thin layers of code, with many layers consisting of only 1 or 2 lines of actual code. Too many layers make debugging a significant challenge, as it becomes hard to determine which layer needs to be debugged.

Another issue with inheritance is that subclasses must be defined in code, which means that program users cannot add new subclasses at runtime. Other design patterns (such as Entity–component–system) allow program users to define variations of an entity at runtime.

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