I'm saying that just because someone learned about a concept (in this case, information hiding) in a certain context (OOP), that does not mean that this is where that concept originated (which was implied). It's a common mistake I see all the time.

In short, information hiding is a concept from modular procedural programming that was then adopted by OOP, not an original OOP concept.

In general, OOP is really mostly a case of "let's take a bunch of known best practices and encourage (or even enforce) them on the language level". Procedural programming can be as object-oriented (or not) as you like. With minimal amounts of syntactic sugar in the compiler, like e.g. rewriting "foo.bar(...)" to "bar(foo,...)" you won't even be able to easily tell the difference when you see the source code.

While I'm at it, the critique that procedural programming necessarily results in a quagmire of global state is also wrong. It's all up to the programmer. Nobody forces you to use globals. Some OO languages try to force you not to, but usually fail in the face of determined opposition from the coder.

In essence, foo coders will find a way to produce foo code.

Got it. Makes sense.

I read their point as “information hiding is not a concept exclusive to OO.”

Whether or not the original quote meant to imply that I’m not sure, but do see how it could be read that way.