I meant hierarchy in the sense of systems built of subsystems, which, in turn, are built of other subsystems, and so on. More like composition. And each subsystem often represents a different, more elementary, level of abstraction.

But, if I understand it correctly, nominal hierarchies can also scale really well, like DNS addresses.

Dns is a hierarchical mapping into a different, not necessarily similar hierarchical mapping. So, I think it strengthens both of our cases.

My point is imagine if the network had to only have the organization that is present in dns names.

DNS only has two levels practically. And technically if you go more than one level you’re probably getting a reply from the same second-level system.

I count at least three levels for most domains.

Root, TLD, domain holder, sometimes further delegation depending on the domain holder.

Except you don’t do all of these three requests, you just access your hoster’s DNS server which already had this cached most probably and returns it.

For most of the cases, you will never be hitting root at all.

If the system was as hierarchical as it was proposed in the parent it would never be stable enough to work due to a single point of failure at root.

Ergo, hierarchies are not natural.

This modern stigma against inheritance is weird. I feel like the people who speak against it either don't actually use it or used it poorly and got burned.

I use it all the time and find it perfectly abstracts things. Yes you can shoot yourself in the foot if you're not careful but wasn't that something we used to like about cpp? If a language is more expressive, I'd wager on average it's more likely to have bugs, but the benefit is an easier expression of skill and brilliance.

Is it modern? I remember being taught to avoid heavy nominal hierarchies about thirty years ago.

Again, they can be useful. No, they are useful. But they are fragile. And are but one way to look at things.

Hierarchies based on functional relationships are simple. Hierarchies based on intrinsic properties become messy fast.

That’s why you throw up your hands and build property webs instead of heirarchies.1

Why do you say it fails miserably? It scales very well in my experience