There was a great talk by (David West) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RdE-d_EhzmA&index=2&list=PLe...) that does make the point that objects have little, if any, value as a programming concept Because all the arguments about objects occurred in the context of programming they focused on things that really don't matter much, like single versus multiple inheritance, dot notation versus explicit messages for getting and setting or invoking methods; class hierarchies, friends, even the idea of a class.

He is more in favor programming of conceptualizing the real world as entities interacting with each other then designing systems that model those interactions. Thinking in objects allow one to design better systems that may not nesseary be represented as OOP in the language.

Jumping to the conclusion of his talk, he more or less advocating in using Abstract Data Type instead of objects. That's what I got from it anyway. Though it kind of reinforces that OOP changes depending on who you talk too.

Kudos for mentioning David West! I strongly recommend his book "Object Thinking" as the book about what OOP really is, how object orientation is achieved and which languages' philosophy is OO compatible and which ain't (spoiler: C++ and Java are in the latter group). While Java is my favorite language so far, I certainly hope that some proper OO language will emerge in the near future.

I'm on the fence about Object Thinking. Most of OOP books I've read are very anecdotal without any empirical evidence to back up their claims. I've read a couple of research papers that used used (empirical evidence) to see if OOP was better than any of the competing other languages. The paper conclude's there isn't really any significant difference. The only difference they did find is higher languages where less code, but the complexity per line was higher than earlier languages.

One recent paper I read is called (The Confounding Effect of Class Size on the Validity of Object-Oriented Metrics) concluded when you've control for class size all OOM disappeared. In other word's, you can ignore most OOP Metrics and simply run a line count over a single file and it give you a better indication bugs/faults a class may have over running the OOP metrics.

I do think David West is a smart guy, but nothing from what I've seen in `Object Thinking` comes with any significant examples, sample group, or control study that measure his approach of Object Thinking.