Is OOP too hard for the masses?

The .Net Answers blog has provocative post entitled “Object Oriented Programming Has Failed Us.” The gist is that, while OOP is in theory awesome, most programmers can’t really get their heads around it. The writer cites the guess that, back in the day, in the transition from C to C++ during college, around 80 percent simply wrote C code with C++ syntax, and the same is true of modern object-oriented languages — most coders learn the syntax but don’t really write the truly object-oriented code that the language makes possible. In a profoundly pessimistic conclusion, the writer feels that most people can’t handle OOP conceptually, and thinks that we should design languages around the way people actually think. Soon Hi responds by placing the blame firmly on the current CS education: too much focus on syntax and theory, not on real-world situations in which OOP would actually be useful. Also of interest on this subject: An InfoQ post on the best learning tools for undergrads; and a long-ish bit from Mark Miller on the history of OOP (and how Java still hasn’t caught up with the radical ideas put forth in Smalltalk).