My apologies if I wasn't clear, my point is only the full blown object oriented style of programming (meaning one where everything in the program is modeled as

My apologies if I wasn't clear, my point is only the full blown object oriented style of programming (meaning one where everything in the program is modeled as an own entity with its own state that responds as it wishes to a set of messages) is silly. The "everything is an object" idea. Objects with no associated behavior or state aren't objects, *by definition*, and there's plenty of code out there that benefits from data with no associated behavior and behavior with no associated data. This happens even in true OO languages like smalltalk. Attempting to model everything as "objects" (read: own private state + behavior) not only may have performance implications due to poor cache usage and multiple indirections, it also makes modelling certain concepts harder (see: object-relational mismatch). The example I gave is a clear example of the latter, since it is very much a relational problem. (Eric Lippert has some very good articles on the matter). That's not to say objects aren't valuable (they appear as a pattern even in functional languages) nor that "live" software isn't a great idea. Personally I think a lot of software would benefit from extensibility, which means plugins at least, which in turn means objects (private state + responding to a set of messages as they wish)