[asurty]

This reminds me of a podcast I listened to recently about creativity. Maybe its not about the idiomatic question of whether classes are good or bad but more about the act of placing the limitation that helps drive the masterpiece?

https://www.npr.org/transcripts/719557642

[INTPnerd]

In Kotlin classes and methods are closed by default, making avoiding inheritance and polymorphism the default. It also makes you mark each variable as mutable or immutable, by declaring it with a var or val, making you think more about (and enforce) state being mutable or immutable, thus avoiding a lot of state problems. It also has a concept called data classes, which works really well for most well designed classes. I now consider the case where a class is not a good candidate for data classes to be a code smell. Most classes should be a good candidate for data classes or else you are usually using classes in a way that causes more problems than it solves.

The thing is, it doesn't prevent you from creating classes or methods that are open for inheritance, nor does it prevent you from allowing mutable state, but it does use the defaults and the language design to encourage limitations that are usually good.

Perhaps they could take these concepts a step further by making classes data classes by default, having a keyword for it to not be a data class.