>Apparently oop as envisioned by Alan Kay was supposed to work like cells in the body that pass messages between each other and take actions independently.
IIRC he was interested in an abstraction that worked "all the way up" - he wanted the abstraction to essentially be a tiny computer. It's a cool idea with a lot of power. But it really is too powerful for applications, and leads to the same complexity problems you get in large distributed systems. And to not have 'function' as a primitive is inexcusable in any language.
Java's lack of a function primitive is a key weakness. It means you must have at least one "utility class" per project - a public class with static methods that are themselves simple functions. (The relatively recent introduction of lambdas, or anonymous inner classes, does not really address the problem. That's just ugly syntax sugar).
IIRC he was interested in an abstraction that worked "all the way up" - he wanted the abstraction to essentially be a tiny computer. It's a cool idea with a lot of power. But it really is too powerful for applications, and leads to the same complexity problems you get in large distributed systems. And to not have 'function' as a primitive is inexcusable in any language.
Java's lack of a function primitive is a key weakness. It means you must have at least one "utility class" per project - a public class with static methods that are themselves simple functions. (The relatively recent introduction of lambdas, or anonymous inner classes, does not really address the problem. That's just ugly syntax sugar).