Thanks. A quote often attributed to Dijkstra is "Object-oriented programming is an exceptionally bad idea which could only have originated in California," but

Thanks. A quote often attributed to Dijkstra is "Object-oriented programming is an exceptionally bad idea which could only have originated in California," but the article you refer to makes quite clear he was aware of its Norwegian origins, and that he considers it a small and oversold addition to imperative programming, rather than a bad idea. I note he wasn't very keen on functional programming (6.1) or logic programming (6.2) (and by implication non-imperative languages in general) because they don't fit well onto the hardware currently available. But that limits you to imperative languages, whose code is much more difficult to test for correctness. I accept that preventing programming errors is important, but also think that languages should be designed for the problems they're intended to solve, whether or not that's a good fit for current hardware. If it isn't a good fit, I'd argue that the problem is with the hardware.