I started with mainstream procedural and OO languages like C++ and Java. I felt like I had a pretty good understanding of OOP by the time I left university. Lat

I started with mainstream procedural and OO languages like C++ and Java. I felt like I had a pretty good understanding of OOP by the time I left university. Later, learning a little about FP took my OOP to a whole new level. I really recommend reading Sussman and Steele if you haven't already, it's basically a constructive proof showing how to represent objects in a functional language. Unfortunately the title is so boring that generations of CS undergrads skipped reading the paper, so the zeitgeist forgot. Hewitt was another important researcher at the MIT AI lab at that time credited with discovering the Actor Model, which basically combines objects with a concurrency model. I've seen him post on HN occasionally =) So many people think "OOP == classes", and I think it's really a shame that (in many ways superior) alternative representations were relegated to the sidelines for so long. I see Java's relatively recent inclusion of algebraic datatypes as a tacit admission that contemporary computing requires different primitives, and I expect to see a shift in best practices towards objects represented as immutable data structures combined with effectively-pure functions. Just like the FP folks have been saying all along! > This work developed out of an initial attempt to understand the actorness of actors... Sussman suggested the experimental approach of actually building an "ACTORS interpreter"... When it was completed, we discovered that the "actors" and the lambda expressions were identical in implementation. https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/5794 https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/5794