As others have said; objects in programming languages do not map well to objects in the real world because a. the real world is vastly more complicated than any

As others have said; objects in programming languages do not map well to objects in the real world because a. the real world is vastly more complicated than any constructed abstraction, and b. our minds permit vagueness whereas computers do not. It is not the case, anyway, that say nouns map to real-world objects for example. There are infinitely many variations and intricacies in the way we humans interpret nouns, many of which are entirely context-based. That is another issue - PLs do not have a sense of context the same way we humans do (which is probably a good thing as I'd rather a PL be less vague than a highly context-sensitive conversation with a friend.) For an indication of the depth of complexity of natural language and the philosophical difficulties therein, Ludwig Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations is a good place to look - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_investigations http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_investigations. I do think there is a deeper issue with objects in that the environment in which they are constructed often fails to permit the kind of complicated interrelation that the concept of the object should actually have, i.e. there is not enough freedom to compose and combine objects in a way entirely cohesive with the way you think of the object. However that has less to do with the relationship between natural language and programming and more to do with the limitations of oop itself.