"99 Bottles of OOP" by Sandi Metz does a fantastic job IMO of answering the first 3 questions listed. > Can I write a serious program without OO... Absolutely

"99 Bottles of OOP" by Sandi Metz does a fantastic job IMO of answering the first 3 questions listed. > Can I write a serious program without OO... Absolutely! See any program written in a functional only language, or C. > Should I look into another paradigm? Eventually... I'm personally a huge fan of Clojure. That said, don't give up on OOP. It's pretty unavoidable in industry.