When we hear the word “inheritance”, code may not be the first thing that springs to mind; we’re probably more likely to think of inheriting genetic traits, like the eye color from a mother or dimples from a grandfather. In the world of Object-Oriented Programming, inheritance is actually one of the core pillars for creating intricate structures with our classes. To dive into this concept, let’s examine a Dog and Cat class:

class Dog:

  def bark(self):
    print('Woof!')

class Cat:

  def meow(self):
    print('Meow!')

These two classes define two distinct animals with their own methods of communication. Now, what if we wanted to give both of these classes the ability to eat by calling a method called eat(). We could write the method twice in both classes but then we would be repeating code! We also may need to write it inside every specific animal class we ever create. Instead, we can utilize the power of inheritance.

Since both Cat and Dog fall under the classification of Animal we can create a parent class to represent properties and methods they can both share! Here is what it might look like:

class Animal: 
  def eat(self): 
    print("Nom Nom Nom...eating food!")

Great, we have an Animal class with a eat() method, but how do we actually get the Dog and Cat class to inherit this method so it can be shared with both classes? Well here is what the base structure will look like:

class ParentClass:
  #class methods/properties...

class ChildClass(ParentClass):
  #class methods/properties...

If we apply this structure to our example, our code looks like this:

class Dog(Animal):
  def bark(self):
    print('Bark!')

class Cat(Animal):
  def meow(self):
    print('Meow!')

Now, let’s see inheritance in action:

fluffy = Dog()
zoomie = Cat()

fluffy.eat() # Nom Nom Nom...eating food!
zoomie.eat() # Nom Nom Nom...eating food!

As we can see, there are some clear advantages of utilizing inheritance. Not only are we able to reuse methods across multiple classes using our parent class, but we are also able to create parent-child relationships between entities!