Or as it's lived in all of java culture (and beyond) that isn't infested by that very special thought universe that exists around the landmarks of j2ee, "beans"

Or as it's lived in all of java culture (and beyond) that isn't infested by that very special thought universe that exists around the landmarks of j2ee, "beans" and the spring framework, "classes" are just namespaces for organising your code that may or may not also happen to identify the type of a struct. A good term for that mindset would be "post OOP". As someone from that group, all I could think reading that CLOS post was "cute, the author really believes in all those early OOP promises? Must be a time traveler from the 20th century!" Actually checked the date, but then on the other hand they didn't have blogs yet when OOP was the future.