Jon Pretty

OOP's idea to bundle state and the methods that operate on it together into objects is underrated and also nuanced: nothing stops us applying global methods to global state, but we'd need more identifier prefixes. So it's easier to make related methods and state "mutually local".

Rich Hickey disagrees, saying that's complecting. In Clojure (and not only) the philosophy is that the data-structure survives more than the code that operates on it and it's wrong to tie them together. But I agree w/ you and I like my encapsulation.

But there's another point which is that the state may be *several* values, coupled by virtue of being accessible via a single reference. Encapsulated methods can access any of those values without a prefix, which is subtle but significant convenience.