Another 'the sky is falling' article ;) Can someone provide a TL;DR who worked through the entire write-up? When I hear 'OOP must die' I can't help but think that we're throwing away the good bits too and will reinvent the wheel in a few years.

It would be good to define the absolute essence of OOP first, because in 30 years it has been overloaded so much with different meaning that it means everything today. For instance:

- It was a hype/next-big-thing/snake-oil-salesman-material: CORBA and COM used to the silver bullets in the 90's which would solve all software development problems by building applications from reusable components which could interact with each other (but in reality, the only thing that came out of it was embedding Excel tables into Word documents). If this is the essence of OOP, then yes, it deserves to die.

- If it the software design principle of thinking 'object oriented'? Then this is already a 2-edged sword. The main problem here is to fall into the trap of trying to model a software system after the real world (the animal-cat-dog problem). Is inheritance, polymorphism, encapsulation, message passing a bad thing? I would say mostly not, but it can be abused, most of these solved actual real-world problems.

- Are the OOP language features the essence of OOP? 'Everything is an object'? Multiple inheritance? Here it gets fuzzy because languages (and their standard frameworks) are so radically different.

To me the pragmatic essence of OOP is that it groups the data and the code which works on that data. If there's a pure C library which has a function to create some sort of 'context' and then has functions which take a context pointer as argument, then this is object-oriented to me. Most other features, like classes, inheritance, runtime polymorphism is just sugar-topping; useful in some cases, but not the essence.

Even with this simple definition, it is easy to fall into the real-world-object trap by designing complex systems as some sort of object-soup which communicate through messages. That's hard to debug and optimise for performance (but it's still easier to maintain then having one big soup of global functions and variables).

Data-oriented-design is one obvious answer to fix some OOP-design-problems. First concentrate on the data, not the code, divide it into 'hot and cold' data, group by access patterns, think about cache misses. After that, the code that works on that data usually 'writes itself'.

And, IMHO OOP itself is completely orthogonal to the really hard problems: memory safety and lifetime management without runtime overhead, concurrency, reducing complexity and improving maintainability of big software systems.

Your mileage may vary of course, my background is games programming, and I started with Z80 assembly, dabbled a bit with Pascal, Forth and Lisp in the 80's before coming to C, then C++ and Python, and I tend strongly towards Rust for future work. I'm only using the parts of C++ that I feel improve on raw C (there once was an object-oriented UI framework on the Amiga called Intuition which bolted classes and methods on top of C, that was the point where I thought that it's really time to learn some C++).