To provide a bit of context for some of the younger readers, certain advocates of OO in the early 90's argued that it would be an end of ALL procedural code. A

To provide a bit of context for some of the younger readers, certain advocates of OO in the early 90's argued that it would be an end of ALL procedural code. At the time, I listened to a talk by a computing consultant who asserted that, by the year 2000, all programming would be objects with no methods. Methods were just a crutch for programmers who didn't understand proper OO methodology. The same went for message passing, by the way. He believed that later versions of SmallTalk would eliminate message passing, as passing a message was just a procedure with extra steps. The programmer of the 21st century would merely define a class that inherits from other classes containing the desired behaviour. For example, at the base level, a language might have a "PrintH" class that prints the letter H where instantiated (with similar classes for other classes). You might then simply write your program class Main : inherits PrintH, PrintELower, PrintLLower, PrintLLower, PrintOLower, PrintComma, PrintSpace, PrintW, PrintOLower, PrintRLower, PrintLLower, PrintDLower Now, the above code is obviously tedious, but most programming would be done via higher level libraries. The important part was that a class was purely defined by what it inherits - the language would have no operation beyond inheritance. This was the only way to ensure that all code would be reusable.