Inheritance is certainly one of the most valuable concepts in object-oriented programming. It's a way to compartmentalize and reuse code by creating collections of attributes and behaviors called classes which can be based on previously created classes. But abusing this concept by creating a deep inheritance tree can lead to very complex and unmaintainable source code. Most of the time a too deep inheritance tree is due to bad object oriented design which has led to systematically use 'inheritance' when for instance 'composition' would suit better.
