Java’s single inheritance limitation is usually not a problem in the normal course of development. In fact, the need to use multiple inheritance could be a sign of a bad design.

Java doesn’t support multiple inheritance through class extension, however. When viewing an inheritance hierarchy, you can easily detect multiple inheritance by the presence of a diamond pattern.

To quote Bjarne Stroustrup, "Multiple inheritance is like a parachute. Most of the time you don't need it, but when you do need it, you really need it." In the early days of C++, before templates ...

Java does enable the option to mark a class as final to eliminate the ability to perform inheritance complete, but that is often too heavy of a hammer to drop. Marking a class as final prevents all ...