As a disclosure, I've been using Ruby for the past three years, and it's about as object-y as you can get. However, Ruby opened my eyes a bit to exploring othe

As a disclosure, I've been using Ruby for the past three years, and it's about as object-y as you can get. However, Ruby opened my eyes a bit to exploring other languages. Point is, as I started looking at other languages in depth, I found myself using objects a little bit less, especially in the design pattern sense. Some problems in the traditional 23 design patterns just disappear in dynanmic languages. After programming in Lua and Javascript, I find objects nice, but optional. Nowadays, I sort of just use classes to scope and namespace. I keep state in classes when it makes sense. To counter the point about state, Erlang programs do have state. They're just contained locally within a function. Since Erlang has tail recursion, you just call the same function recursively and pass the state variable you want to keep at the very end of the function for the lifetime of the program. Because it's tail recursion, there's no stack overflow. Also, Erlang threads can keep 'state' inside of the Mnesia database that comes with Erlang. State is only evil when it's shared. Because state is contained locally in a function, a single Erlang thread can do whatever it wants, whenever it wants with those variables. Threads communicate through message passing. Therefore, no need for locks, mutexes or semaphores. Along with the low overhead of thread creation (~300 bytes) they're part of the reason why Erlang has great concurrency properties.