[krylon]

For quite a while, there was significant buzz around OOP, and some people did, in fact, overrate it. But I get the impression that over the last couple of years, more and more people have begun to realize that OOP is not the solution to every problem and started looking in new directions (such as functional programming).

I think this why Go has become so popular. It deliberately is not object-oriented in the traditional sense, yet it gives you most of the advantages of OOP (except for people who are into deep and intricate inheritance hierarchies, I guess). (I don't know how many people are actually using it, but now that I think of it, the same could be said of Erlang - the language itself does not offer any facilities for OOP, but in a way Erlang is way OOP, if you think of processes as objects that send and respond to messages.)

So I think there is nothing blasphemous about your statement (in fact, Go allows you to switch on the type of a value).

(I am not saying that OOP is bad - there are plenty of problems for which OOP-based solutions are pretty natural, and I will use them happily in those cases; but I get the feeling that at some point people got a bit carried away by the feeling that OOP is the solution to every problem and then got burnt when reality asserted itself. The best example is probably Java.)