[bsder]

Well, there are two levels to this:

1) It was in fact mostly C++ brain damage. "Design Patterns" predates Java by quite a bit.

2) OOP isn't a unified thing. There was a paper way back that mentioned something like two dozen "characteristics" of "OOP". And then proceeded to point out that "Smalltalk" chooses these, C++ chooses those, Java chooses these, and that there was a lot of disjointed-ness between the definitions.

[CRConrad]

Yup. So the vaunted "brain damage of OOP" is more a matter of the "brain damage" of C++'s / Java's choice of which of these traits to implement and call the result "OOP".

(Personally, I largely agree -- and I say that as a fan of a basically very similar OO language, Object Pascal [as seen in Delphi and Free Pascal / Lazarus], which could also be seen as an imperative language with bolted-on inheritable templates of records with method pointers called classes. It just made a slightly different, and better [IMO], choice of exactly which of these traits to implement, and that makes a all the difference to me.)