[_asummers]

In addition to what you said, OO to me is all about things sending messages back and forth between black boxes, such that the message contains everything the recipient needs to either do its job or find the information needs to do its job. Alan Kay (since you brought up Smalltalk) has said that he wishes he called it Message Oriented Programming instead, because people took the wrong message out of the name. In this line, Erlang and Smalltalk, and to a slightly lesser extent Objective-C more fit in with this. But you can code that way in Java or whatever, if you just think about the message between entities being an actual first order thing in your system.

[qwertyuiop924]

Yes. Java's main failings were its strong typing (forcing interfaces to be a needlessly awkward solution), and an emphasis on inheritance, creating deeply nested hierarchies, and leading people to use Hungarian Notation, creating even more awkward naming.

In any case, you can write OO in any language. Heck, if you look into the history, Scheme, A multiparadigm language in the Lisp family typically associated with FP, was actually intended to be something approximating OO (it was designed to implement Carl Hewitt's Actor Model, so as to help Sussman and Steele understand it better. They subsequently realized that their code for creating actors and sending messages was identical to their code for instantiating and calling functions, leading them to generalize and only include lambda in the language, concluding that actors and functions were one and the same. Hewitt did not approve).