Objects are the building blocks of programs. Objects in a programming language are roughly equivalent to nouns in a natural language in that they represent some person, place, thing or idea in the software system. Objects may represent tangible things in the real world, like "school,' "city," or "automobile," or more abstract concepts like "meeting," department," or "House of Representatives."
--Conner, Niguidula, and van Dam, Object-Oriented Programming in Pascal
In the object-oriented paradigm, ideas can be put together like TinkerToys, linked to each other to form complex structures within which users can navigate. In such a structure, the whole becomes greater than the sum of the individual objects, as their linkages denote causal relationships (or merely casual ones).
