> A lot of so-called programmers and systems "engineers" act like religious zealots.

Rather ironic given that in this very comment section I'm largely seeing that behavior associated with people appealing to Casey as an authority as an excuse not to engage with intelligently written counterpoints.

I certainly won't defend the historic OOP hype but a tool is not limited by how the majority happen to use it at any given time. Rallying against a tool or concept itself is the behavior of a zealot. It's rallying against a particular use that might have merit.

This is completely true, of course—the only reason I'm being a bit hyperbolic is because some rebalancing is still in order.

I agree that once the field matures what we will really (hopefully) finally see are people adopting different modes of organization based on the second order systems properties they support, rather than ideology or personal experience—but we aren't there yet.

I think there are certain cases in which using an object oriented approach makes sense, but man, it has led to so many bloated, needlessly complicated systems in which the majority of the work is dealing with inanities imposed by OOP discipline and structure rather than dealing with the actual problem the system is supposed to solve.

Just let me ask you this: How many years have you been in this game? I came in around 1990, but my first professional coding job wasn't until after I finished a BS in CS and Math in 1995. To me, having the perspective I have, OOP looks in retrospect to have been an enormous boondoggle championed by the Boomer generation. It as all people who did Waterfall, wrote endless requirements documents before coding anything, and did quarterly or even yearly code releases, if you can even imagine that.