If I understand correctly, this rant is about the use of simplistic examples in teaching OOP, correct? i.e. it's not just about using such examples when debati

If I understand correctly, this rant is about the use of simplistic examples in teaching OOP, correct? i.e. it's not just about using such examples when debating language features. If so, then I very strongly disagree with this guy. I have painful memories of trying to come to grip with OO in high school in the early 90's. Sure, those zoological and automotive examples are almost insultingly trivial, but that's because you don't need real-world engineering complexity interfering when you're just trying to wrap your head around inheritance and extension! Bird ==> Duck makes sense because they're classes. As in, those are classes of animals in the real world, and there is a relationship among them. Expressing that relationship in code doesn't mean you're coding animals, it means you're modeling a real-world class hierarchy with your data definition. I think that people are forgetting that OOP is actually hard. If you don't already have a very strong grasp on the underlying mechanics of a language (e.g. function pointers and vtables in C++), then it's going to always seem like magic.