>The REAL goal is to find a collection of abstractions that is powerful enough to accomplish what the program requires but as simple as possible (and as local a

>The REAL goal is to find a collection of abstractions that is powerful enough to accomplish what the program requires but as simple as possible (and as local as possible) to allow humans to comprehend (and maintain) it. I like to think that practicing OOP in some sense is a process of defining new language and then using this language to programs something. This can be said about almost any programming in general, but in OOP you can see bad abstractions very well. The real problem of OOP is that most "average" programmers are bad at defining languages. From my unscientific observations in any large C++ project only few developers actually produce usable class hierarchies. Same applies to large Java projects to somewhat lesser degree - Java has better defined patterns and more extensive standard library.