By "methods that don't depend on a state" I mean that you don't need an object. The point of objects is that they manage their own state, and you only need to w

By "methods that don't depend on a state" I mean that you don't need an object. The point of objects is that they manage their own state, and you only need to worry about sending them messages. I agree that they are just functions, but no one is trying to "hack" or to break encapsulation. They could have used packages instead, yes... But having them inside classes is pretty convenient as this allows us to have a better syntax. Oh and not being able to pass classes around is a language-specific thing, so you can't really use that as an argument against static methods.