I also think it's about how many people you can get to buy-in on an abstraction. There probably are better ways of doing things than the unix-y way of having an OS, but so much stuff is built with the assumption of a unix-y interface that we just stick with it.
Like why can't I just write a string of text at offset 0x4100000 on my SSD? You could but a file abstraction is a more manageable way of doing it. But there are other manageable ways of doing it right? Why can't I just access my SSD contents like it's one big database? That would work too right? Yeah but we already have the file abstraction.
>But OOP, as I take it, is exactly that idea. That you're creating lots of perfect objects with a clear and defined purpose, and a perfect implementation. And you combine them to implement the functional requirements, even though each individual component knows only a small part of them, and is ideally reusable in your next project!
I think OOP makes sense when you constrain it to a single software component with well defined inputs and outputs. Like I'm sure many GoF-type patterns were used in implementing many STL components in C++. But you don't need to care about what patterns were used to implement anything in <algorithm> or <vector>. you just use these as components to build a larger component. When you don't have well defined components that just plug and play over the same software bus, no matter how good you are in design patterns it's gonna eventually turn into spagetti un-understandable mess.
I'm really liking your writing style by the way, do you have a blog or something?