it could very well be snake oil, but I make a living doing it (or at least knowing how to answer C++ questions during interviews. many of my jobs were advertised as SE but really dont require much actual coding (to my frustration)) and I actually enjoy C++.

Personally, I think both java and javascript (yes I know they are entirely separate languages ) are snake oil. But you know, I learned to program in them anyway.

I tried to find a happy medium where I learn about a new technology and see if it sticks. If after 3-5 years its still around, I give it a try. This worked for me for javascript and python. When python first came out (or when I first heard of it ) I said "no way, not learning a new language right now. perl works fine as a scripting language". Then year after year I kept hearing about it, and heard about perl less and less. Then I finally tried it.

But a couple years ago, I kept hearing about "coffee script" and "clojure". I said the same thing, "not touching it". And now, I hardly ever hear about them, and I barely even know what they are.

From what you are saying I guess you have never been in an OO project but you just worked in the "cold hell" of procedOOral code, the worst mix of copy and paste, overblown inheritance and singletons. I experienced a lot of it in my career, nowadays I am more oriented towards the functional world, but saying that OO is completely useless and even dangerous is an outright lie. The most awful codebases on which I worked on would have been quite nice applying the OO best practices. Sadly they where far too big to be changed by the concerted effort of a couple of people. And they were full of anti-patterns. Even loving the type safety of F# and Haskell I can't honestly say that OO is an anti-pattern per se. What it matters is not the size of the hammer but how you use it. But I can rightfully proclaim that the wrong tools used for something that they were never meant for are the worst possible solution. EVER.

I've spent 10+ years of my career working in OO languages, I'm no stranger to it and I've seen it used well. But we'll tends to be a subset of OO, with minimal inheritance and encapsulation with data and logic in seperate places.

You would probably enjoy Go, for the most part.

I've been thinking that. Rust is probably next on my list though.