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    If you have full control of your code, then it is not terrible, I suppose, but a bit on a OCD side. What if you miss a class (e.g it has no children but it aint final)? It is better let a tool scan the code and tell you whether some class has children. As soon as you package this as a library and give it to someone else, dealing with 'final' becomes a pain.
    – Job
    Commented Jul 2, 2011 at 13:58
  • For example, MbUnit is an open framework for .Net unit testing, and MsTest ain't (surprise surprise). As the result, you HAVE to shell out 5k to MSFT just because you want to run some tests the MSFT way. Other test runners cannot run the test dll that is built with MsTest - all because of the final classes that MSFT used.
    – Job
    Commented Jul 7, 2011 at 4:24
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    Some blog post about the topic: Final Classes: Open for Extension, Closed for Inheritance (May 2014; by Mathias Verraes)
    – hakre
    Commented May 18, 2014 at 16:16
  • Nice article. It speaks my thoughts about this. I did not know about those annotations so that was handy. Cheers.
    – JW01
    Commented May 21, 2014 at 19:54
  • "PHP 5 introduces the final keyword, which prevents child classes from overriding a method by prefixing the definition with final. If the class itself is being defined final then it cannot be extended." php.net/manual/en/language.oop5.final.php It is not bad at all.
    – Black
    Commented Sep 24, 2019 at 7:19