[mgummelt]

I think we're in violent agreement here. AFAICT, the feature sets of OOP and non-OOP languages have converged so much that inheritance is really the last differentiator. Maybe you could throw dynamic dispatch in there, but there's no reason in principle an OOP language couldn't add dynamic dispatch.

[macintux]

Mutability is a huge differentiator for some languages.

And dynamic dispatch is already part of Smalltalk and Objective-C, I believe.

[mgummelt]

Sure, but mutability is orthogonal to OOP.

[macintux]

As fond as I am of Erlang, I still find it hard to picture an immutable OO language.

[kbp]

> I still find it hard to picture an immutable OO language.

Picture an object-oriented procedural language like Java, and then make everything immutable; for every 'void' method, return an updated copy of 'this'; for every non-void function, return a tuple of the updated copy and the value you were going to return. No change to const methods, obviously. And you're done, and you can still take advantage of encapsulation, polymorphism, and inheritance without any hoops. You can even do it in Java itself as a style thing without too much effort and only a modest amount of boilerplate. Alternatively, it's not that much work to build this same thing out of lambdas and dictionaries, if your language has those but not objects (adding mutation into that object system would then be trivial) (and of course, you can build dictionaries out of lambdas and lambdas out of objects, if need be).

[mgummelt]

Write in scala using only "vals" and there you have it!

[lgas]

Not quite because you can still have a val that points to a mutable object.