The object-oriented programming paradigm was created partly to deal with the ever-increasing complexity of software systems. The idea was to exploit the human mind’s natural capabilities for thinking about the world in terms of objects and classes, thus recruiting our intuitive powers for building formal software systems. Indeed, it has commonly been assumed that the intuitive and formal systems of objects and classes are similar and that fluency in the former helps one deal efficiently with the latter. However, recent studies show that object-oriented programming is quite difficult to learn and practice [ 1, 3, 7]. In this article, we document several such difficulties in the context of experts participating in workshops on object-oriented design (OOD). We use recent research from cognitive psychology to trace the sources of these difficulties to a clash between the intuitive and analytical modes of thinking.
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