Veteran Smalltalker-turned-modern-iot-embedded-polyglot here. OOP is a difficult to judge because it became such a big envelope. Alan Kay famously said in 1997

Veteran Smalltalker-turned-modern-iot-embedded-polyglot here. OOP is a difficult to judge because it became such a big envelope. Alan Kay famously said in 1997 "I invented the term Object Oriented Programming, and this [C++ and Java] is not what I had in mind." He would later even tell the Smalltalk community that even that wasn't spot on, only an early step, to what he was really after in his visionary's quest that would create a DynaBook that would increase world peace (visionaries always reach big). In my own journeys, my own personal conviction came to be that the "paradigm shift" with the OO movement was to learn to bind behavior to data. This (IMO) fits Kay's ideas about cellular biology and the inspiration he embraced with his ideas. It's all about binding behavior to data. Everyone should read that byte magazine (because apparently 500+ pages was a magazine), especially Peter Deutsch's section on block closures. Smalltalk did more with closures than any other language I've used since. Because closures are objects too.