This apparent mismatch has mostly to do with the common use of oo, rather than oo itself. Joe Armstrong, creator of Erlang, is famous for quoting Alan Kay (who

This apparent mismatch has mostly to do with the common use of oo, rather than oo itself. Joe Armstrong, creator of Erlang, is famous for quoting Alan Kay (who invented OO) when he wrote that the big idea behind smalltalk is not classes or objects, but messages (Joe Armstrong recently mentioned this at 4:30 of his most recent Qcon presentation: http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Message-Passing-Concurrency http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Message-Passing-Concurren...) Jim Coplien and Trygve Reenskaug discussed this apparent mismatch on the article: The DCI Architecture: A New Vision of Object-Oriented Programming (on http://www.artima.com/articles/dci_vision.html http://www.artima.com/articles/dci_vision.html). Jim also recently gave a presentation on the subject: http://www.infoq.com/interviews/coplien-dci-architecture http://www.infoq.com/interviews/coplien-dci-architecture.