This is a great post. "A mini program with its own internal state and API" is a great description of what goes wrong with overdesigned classes. Encapsulating

This is a great post. "A mini program with its own internal state and API" is a great description of what goes wrong with overdesigned classes. Encapsulating state into classes originally made sense with early OOP languages, compared to all of it being global which is even worse, but nowadays we've got better ways of managing complexity. Any time something threatens to be a mutable class-level variable, I refactor that out of the design before proceeding. Most often this refactoring is to separate the data into a struct-like class and the behavioral methods into a static class, with what would have been that mutable class-level variable instead passed in to each behavioral function that needs it.