[hxa7241]

It is not so much OO that is receding as inheritance. Although that is not recent -- it must have been around 1995-2000 that doubts were becoming popularly known. Inheritance is somewhat interesting though: it is a formalised mechanism or pattern for changing software function -- there doesn't seem much else like that. Why did it not work very well?

As to OO, Bertrand Meyer gives the best rationale: it is about organising software around data instead of procedure, because data is more stable. That yields a rather abstract definition, but in that sense OO is perhaps more alive now than ever.

What has happened is that the developer's canvas has expanded enormously. We think and write for the WWW first now. The data types are the various sub-parts and relations of web standards. Our software is very much organised around these, they just don't map to small language features.