I can't speak for the community as a whole, but the Haskellers I know generally "bash" OO with respect to its use of pervasive mutable state and open recursion,

I can't speak for the community as a whole, but the Haskellers I know generally "bash" OO with respect to its use of pervasive mutable state and open recursion, and not because the notion of "object" is an inherently wrong one. Those features must be explicitly included in the above model of object (by manually including reference cells and manually invoking a "method" with its own "instance", respectively) whereas they are implicitly included in every object in most commonly-used OO languages. As for multiple dispatch, you could always use multi-param type classes: {-# LANGUAGE MultiParamTypeClasses #-} class Say a b where say :: a -> b -> IO () instance Say Int () where say = putStrLn "Case one" instance Say Int Int where say = putStrLn "Case two" which corresponds roughly to the CLOS snippet (defgeneric say (a b)) (defmethod say ((a integer) (b null)) (format t "Case one")) (defmethod say ((a integer) (b integer)) (format t "Case two")) I do not believe that there is a way to use the record-based model of objects I showed earlier to do the same thing, but perhaps there is some way that is presently eluding me.