Notable for the "behaviour and state":
3. Objects have their own memory (in terms of objects).
4. Every object is an instance of a class (which must be an object).
5. The class holds the shared behavior for its instances (in the form of objects in a program list)
But my point is that I don't agree that an object is "a value that maps names to stuff". I bet even Alan Kay would disagree, seeing as he was a proponent of the Actor model style of working, where objects exchange messages instead of method calls or values. In that case, there are no names to map, there is incoming data that matches a protocol. The object itself determines what behaviour to enact on its own state. Seeing an object as just values and methods is too simplistic, and at the same time too vague to mean anything.And more importantly, as a first sentence to explain what an object is, it's misleading and will raise a lot more questions later.
My problem is that it's not presented as a starting point or even implied that the definition might be wrong. It categorically states "The simplest notion of an object—pretty much the only thing everyone who talks about objects agrees about— is". If it had said "One notion of an object -one that many people who talk about objects agree on- is", all would be dandy. When you're stating things as fact in a document dedicated to learning, they should be solid.
My other gripe is that I've heard too many vague, biased or incomplete answers to the question "what is an object". These are structures people use every second of every day, but they've never learned a proper definition for it?
Well, "behaviour and state" is also incomplete, because it fails to mention anything about how you refer to parts of state and particular behaviours.
"a mapping of names to values and functions" on the other hand mentions both state ("values") and behaviour (functions) and also tells you that they have names.
> they've never learned a proper definition for it?
Well, there are many different valid definitions for objects, and even more for OO. There are people who don't know any of them for sure, but I strongly suspect that you've dismissed many good definitions as "vague, biased, incomplete" on the grounds of them not being your preferred one. You did it at least once just now, when you failed to realize that "a mapping of names to values and functions" is the same thing as "[named] behaviour and state".