[fredrb]

It's interesting to see how many people in this thread have had negative experiences with OOP. As much as I don't do OOP that much anymore, I think it had a positive impact in me. But like every popular practice, there is a lot of bad patterns you have to navigate through.

Things like depending on interfaces as opposed to concrete implementations; or prefer message passing over direct data access are practices that I learned in OOP that I still value. The "Small Talk crowd" from the first team I worked in and influential authors in the topic (specially Sandi Metz) still have a dear place in my heart for how they improved the way I view software design.

[kitd]

I agree. Hating OOP is somewhat mode du jour, but if you started out from languages like FORTRAN and C as I did, you organised your code around abstract data types and operations to work on them (including mechanisms like passing 'this' as the first arg, composition of structures and common operations). OOP was a completely natural extension.