spaghetti inheritance (humour, programming) A term used by users of object-oriented languages with inheritance, such as Smalltalk for a convoluted class-subclass graph, often resulting from carelessly deriving subclasses from other classes just for the sake of reusing their code. Coined to discourage such practice, through guilt-by-association with spaghetti code.
[Jargon File] Last updated: 2013-07-31
