I don't really see a pervasive point to this rant. It is true that OOP can be reduced to message passing, and that there's a specific style of OOP a lot of peop

I don't really see a pervasive point to this rant. It is true that OOP can be reduced to message passing, and that there's a specific style of OOP a lot of people see as "OOP", but that doesn't mean that this style is "just obfuscated procedural code, or uglified functional code". That OOP can be implemented on top of functional style code, or procedural style code says nothing about it being "true OOP" or not. For example, the great Common Lisp Object System is built with functional primitives. And that makes it more elegant, not less. Building an object system on top of a functional/procedural language is syntactic sugar, and there's nothing inherently bad about it. After all we write code for people to read.