1. When OO was on the brink of becoming mainstream, let's say early 90's, there was an awful lot of the most idiotic rubbish talked about reusability. For example I recall one magazine article that, with a completely straight face, told readers that you would be able to buy an "Aeroplane" class that you could slot into pretty much any application that dealt with aeroplanes. So Joe has a point here.
2. This is not an argument for not using classes within a single codebase. And indeed when I see Erlang functions pushing all the relevant state around as parameters in a big mess of tuples and lists like a crazy baglady with all her possessions in a shopping cart, the benefits of encapsulating it all become clear.
1. When OO was on the brink of becoming mainstream, let's say early 90's, there was an awful lot of the most idiotic rubbish talked about reusability. For example I recall one magazine article that, with a completely straight face, told readers that you would be able to buy an "Aeroplane" class that you could slot into pretty much any application that dealt with aeroplanes. So Joe has a point here.
2. This is not an argument for not using classes within a single codebase. And indeed when I see Erlang functions pushing all the relevant state around as parameters in a big mess of tuples and lists like a crazy baglady with all her possessions in a shopping cart, the benefits of encapsulating it all become clear.