Sam Gentile has a good article entitled Multi-Paradigm Design and Generic Programming in which he reminds us: "Object Oriented Design is just one subset of the solution domain and not always appropriate for the problem at hand... In the hands of an experienced designer, there is a whole lot more power and flexibility afforded when designing with more than one design paradigm.", and introduces the nice idea of Policies.

How much paradigm-shock can you take at one go? For overload, try this:

[Prototype-based Multiple Dispatch] begins by reexamining what it means for a method to be applicable to an object. It essentially reverses the decision... Instead of finding a method from an ordering of which all arguments have types that are subtypes of their respective parameters in the method, PMD considers the set of methods which each argument object supports and then attempts to find one that they all hold in common.