Really, it depends on your environment. In Smalltalk, most things are objects. Not surprisingly, it turns out to be easiest to make most things objects. I find that Smalltalk is best when a program is mostly objects, there's a sprinkling of short-ish procedural methods whose workings are hidden by encapsulation, and perhaps a handful of long optimized algorithmic methods.

I suspect that in Self, it's easier to make more things objects. (jk - everything is an object in Self.) Objects aren't quite as easy to use in C++ and Java. The cost is higher, so the opportunities to use objects with a good cost/benefit payoff are fewer. That's all there is to it.

Does this generalize? In most Functional languages, functions are really easy to use, and can be used in flexible and powerful ways. What's the best way to program in them? Why, using functions! Yup, seems to work. Fancy that!

A lot of stuff can work as objects; in fact in many cases an object can be the smallest (or simplest, or most logical etc.) piece of code.

But not everything must be abstracted :)

In Smalltalk, everything is an object.

Also, functions + closures = objects

In some sense that's what the second O says, isn't it?

It's not called Object Programming, but Object-Oriented Programming.

But isn't that where it goes astray?

If we all called it "Class Oriented Programming" we'd come closer to an accurate name. "Class Oriented Programming" as a name might take away the emphasis on instances, and put emphasis on designing classes.

Or not. There appears to be no bottom to human stupidity.

If we apply a design pattern from Smalltalk, we have Concepts. Every Concept has another concept which is its Misconception. This gives us an infinite regress of misconceptions, unless we can come up with a Metamisconception, which is a concept which is its own erroneous misconception. Then we can implement unbounded stupidity in a system of finite size.

Tell that to Java developers :)