It's important to note that there are two schools of OOP that often get conflated and muddy the waters of understanding. On the one hand is the one evidenced in

It's important to note that there are two schools of OOP that often get conflated and muddy the waters of understanding. On the one hand is the one evidenced in the OP and C++, where OOP is mostly an organizing principle and function calls are bound early. On the other side is the Smalltalk school, emphasizing message passing and late bound everything, which is slower but a lot more dynamic and flexible, as best laid out by Kay in his famed email [0]. At this point, object-oriented programming is about as precise a term as socialism (and equally likely to start a flamewar). 0. http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/squeak-dev/1998-October/017019.html http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/squeak-dev/1998-...