The desktop of my computer bears no resemblance to my physical desk. I have no icons on my physical desk. My physical desk can hold absolutely anything no matte

The desktop of my computer bears no resemblance to my physical desk. I have no icons on my physical desk. My physical desk can hold absolutely anything no matter shape or size and I can stack things and put them in piles and clear them off with one swoop of my hand. Also, my computer desktop has nothing on it, which is quite different from my physical desk. The fact that "windows" can "stack... like paper" shows that the real world isn't being modeled. Last time I checked, windows could not be stacked like paper and windows on my computer have very little resemblance to paper in any other way. I'm quite certain paper wasn't the inspiration for stacking windows. I think WYSIWYG editors are a bad idea, precisely because they try to model the real world too closely. Object oriented programming is about much more than modeling real-world objects in code. Sometimes (often in fact) that is exactly the wrong way to create objects. Trying to model software off real-world objects is how you get stupid things like clicking and dragging to flip pages on a document you're reading, all while animating the turning of the pages. The examples you give (where they are accurate at all) are about using physical objects to provide a metaphor for understanding software. The perfect example is the trash / recycle bin. It provides a metaphor that makes it easier for people to learn what it does, but it isn't modeled after a real trash can or recycling bin. You don't have to empty it. You can, but it's not required. You don't have to change bags. It isn't picked up twice a week. It doesn't start to smell after a while. It's of essentially unlimited size. If it was modeled after a real trash can, some of these things would have been implemented in some way.