PHP OOP

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I really love when a debate on this forum sends me off on a tangent, and on that journey I discover little historic gems like this debate about the "The Dumbing Down Of Programming" at the end of the '90s. As they say: "the more things change, the more they stay the same".

Out of all of that a few paragraphs stood out for me:

For example, he points out that low-level assembly-like code and high-level problem-domain code look the same in the ForthLanguage. They are not arbitrarily different in syntax, structure, complexity, etc. They differ only in semantics (one manipulates the processor and the other manipulates problem-domain objects). I think this is crucial. We need to isolate and remove artificial complexity.

Overall, I think that TheDumbingDownOfProgramming is only a symptom of something more - TheDumbingDownOfHumanity?. My observation is that humanity has forgotten many of the basics while it has embraced technology, specialization, and other aspects of modern life. For example, it seems that most of our peers are content to learn one language or database or OS, etc. Many will go on to learn a few other tools. Some will go beyond tools (the what) to explicitly embrace technique (the how and why). But only a few seem to pursue the tools, techniques, and beyond, with a passion and intellect that seems characteristic of our ancestors. Most of our peers today seem uninterested and unprepared to make that endeavor.

Now the for the alternative view.[ Simplification is not "dumbing down." It takes very intelligent people to simplify things. It took a lot of intelligent people and time to go from manual tasks to dedicated hardware for tasks to programmable hardware to software to 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th generation programming languages, etc. It has taken a lot of intelligent people to move computers from the realm of the scientist to where 5 year olds and grandmothers can surf the web. Simplification is hard work and we should take pride in making things simpler and not refer to it as "dumbing down."

The weird part about our debate is that some are now appealing quite the opposite; the claim that we should go back OOP because it's simpler and more familiar than FP . Remember at some point Assembly Language was more familiar than C, so by that measure why do we even have OOP?