"Are you talking about the notion that OO is about making an ontology, and that recapitulating a poorly-thought-out subset of the Dewey Decimal System in your c

"Are you talking about the notion that OO is about making an ontology, and that recapitulating a poorly-thought-out subset of the Dewey Decimal System in your codebase will somehow make it easier to reason about and extend?" I'm referring to the origin of OO in Simula, a language for writing simulations. From that early OO had an extremely strong bias in favor of modelling "domain objects". In that model of OO, having an "iterator" class is actively wrong, because there's no physical corresponding to an object. That's where the Car/Engine/Tires example comes from, and to a lesser extent the Animal/Mammal/Cow etc. examples. It's been 25 years or so, but I think when I took my software engineering class I was actively told my OO should model real things. The irony is that I think OO shines most brightly in the abstract machinery of programming like iterators and other machinery like that. It has problems when you try to connect it to the real world by "exporting" the purely internal state changes out to something real. This is a general problem in software and it's not like I have perfect solution, but the OO tools tend to not be anywhere near as helpful here. (By that I mean, yes, we write the code that does this in an OO context, but inheritance/private/public/etc. isn't really that helpful in terms of keeping a particular variable in your object in sync with the database value it's supposed to reflect, for instance.) Simula somewhat deceived the early practitioners, because in Simula, state changes within the object are the desired outcome; when your Engine object flips its On flag from false to true, the object's job is done. This does not necessarily translate into the real world anywhere near as well. And yes, goto is definitely another one of those things were you can't understand the old criticisms through a modern language lens, because the goto we have today has been tamed and brought to heel under structured program's constraints. However, unlike alephnan's objection that he doesn't see the point of the RPC criticisms which I think is the common case, the goto criticisms continue to live on as zombies long after the thing being criticized is actually dead and buried, injuring the more modern version.