> These are three incredibly vague terms that pretty much every programming language can be said to provide. I can't understand how you think OOP is defined by

> These are three incredibly vague terms that pretty much every programming language can be said to provide. I can't understand how you think OOP is defined by this. I do not want to defend OOP, but I would like to add that object-orientated languages are often to be expected to support these 3 things (encapsulation, inheritance and polymorphism) - at least many sources list these properties as must-have to be considered object-orientated. > This is the kind of argument that convinces me that OOP is completely bunk. Agreed. E.g. functional programming has a sound foundation (λ-calculus), but in object-oriented land if often sounds a little bit hand-wavy.