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Pike, who now works for Google, Inc., said: "I'm not much of a fan of object-oriented design," though he conceded that the future does indeed seem to have, as he puts it, "an OO hue."

Pike then went on to offer an analogy aimed at exposing the weakness of using only OO methodology in all cases:

"If you want to make some physical artifact, you might decide to build it purely in wood because you like the way the grain of the wood adds to the beauty of the object. In fact many of the most beautiful things in the world are made of wood. But wood is not ideal for everything. No amount of beauty of the grain can make wood conduct electricity, or support a skyscraper, or absorb huge amounts of energy without breaking. Sometimes you need metal or plastic or synthetic materials; more often you need a wide range of materials to build something of lasting value. Don't let the fact that you love wood blind you to the problems wood has as a material, or to the possibilities offered by other materials."

"OO is great for problems where an interface applies naturally to a wide range of types," Pike added, "not so good for managing polymorphism (the machinations to get collections into OO languages are astounding to watch and can be hellish to work with), and remarkably ill-suited for network computing."

"That's why I reserve the right to match the language to the problem, and even - often - to coordinate software written in several languages towards solving a single problem," he continued.

Pike accepted that OO design is the way people are taught to think about computing these days: "I guess that's OK - the work does seem to get done, after all - but I wish the view was a little broader."

Personally, though, he reserved the right to match the language to the problem, and even - often - to coordinate software written in several languages towards solving a single problem.

"It's that last point - different languages for different subproblems - that sometimes seems lost to the OO crowd," Pike said. "In a typical working day I probably use a half dozen languages - C, C++, Java, Python, Awk, Shell - and many more little languages you don't usually even think of as languages - regular expressions, Makefiles, shell wildcards, arithmetic, logic, statistics, calculus - the list goes on."

Pike agreed that object-oriented design has much to say to Unix, "but no more than functions or concurrency or databases or pattern matching or little languages or..."

"Unix in all its variants has become so important as the operating system of the Internet that whatever the Java applications and desktop dances may lead to, Unix will still be pushing the packets around for a quite a while," he remarked.