Or, we are failing ourselves, but otherwise you are completely right. There is nothing in the article explaining why author thinks that "Object Oriented Programming has Failed Us".
Anyway, this is a good way to trick Hacker News:
1. Write curious title with some programming term in it.
2. Write some random thoughts in the article body mentioning the term.
3. Submit to HN
4. Traffic!
I cringed at the comparison to mathematical proofs and the "multidimensional" aspects of programming (whatever that means), but the thesis was good, and I'm interested in how the HN community can expound on it... hence, the upvote.
How is the thesis good? The thesis states: average developers are too dumb to grok object-oriented programming so that some alternative simpler method for data hiding and encapsulation needs to be adopted. Only the really smart people should be allowed to dabble in the dark arts of OOP, and only then if they've been properly mentored by an elite priesthood.
Programming is hard. Let's go shopping. The article comes near, but does not directly address the fact that OOP is just one of several techniques and language features that have, over the years promised to make programming easy. People either fail to understand and properly adopt the new techniques or they do adopt the new techniques and simply find something else that makes programming hard.
The best we can hope for is that a technique expands what is within the reach of the average programmer. The problem of the day gets moved to the solved category and we move on to bigger and better things, which are also hard. Those of us who enjoy programming and earn a living from it should hope that this cycle is not broken.
This link is currently in the #2 position on the front page. I wonder if the people who up voted it actually read it or just agreed with the thesis?