Over the years I've come to believe that OOP is primarily an elaborate mechanism for keeping the lunatic in the next cubicle from shooting himself in your foot.

Over the years I've come to believe that OOP is primarily an elaborate mechanism for keeping the lunatic in the next cubicle from shooting himself in your foot. Assuming the overall architecture is relatively sane, the lunatic can safely do whatever weird nonsense he like in the privacy of his own objects. If all the developers on your team are sane, then OOP is just a bunch of unnecessarily verbose conceptual complexity. (The unfortunate corollary, of course, is that the code from the lunatic in the next cubicle is just as likely to be your own code from six months ago)