Inheritance was invented as a performance hack

Inheritance was invented as a performance hack It's well known that inheritance was invented by Simula. The History of Programming Languages session on Simula tells us the motivations behind that invention. Let's take a look. Simplifying the garbage collector Simula had a simple reference counting and garbage collection implementation: Unable to find such a [manual memory allocation] scheme providing sufficient programming flexibility, we implemented a reference count scheme, an idea borrowed from Weizenbaum (1962), and also added a "last resort" garbage collector. – Section 2.3.3, The Development Of The Simula Languages A process could outlive its dynamic parent, i.e., the block instance containing the generating expression which gave rise to the process. As a result the process might access nonexisting data through its formal parameters. The remedy chosen was to forbid all kinds of call by name parameters to processes (including procedures, labels, and switches). – Section 2.3.3 ... Read full article.