While I was trying to find a quote, roughly saying “I know my students begin to understand object-oriented programming when they start to anthropomorphize their objects”, I could only find Dijkstra’s bashing of OO and anthropomorphization: http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/264.
“As a teacher of object-oriented programming, I know that I have succeeded when students anthropomorphise their objects, that is, when they turn to their partners and speak of one object asking another object to do something. I have found that this happens more often, and more quickly, when I teach with Smalltalk than when I teach with Java: Smalltalk programmers tend to talk about objects, while Java programmers tend to talk about classes.” Object-oriented programming: some history, and challenges for the next fifty years by Andrew P. Black
Anthropomorphizing computer programs is a time-honoured tradition, which may explain some of the usage in a less worrisome way.
Typically I think of intelligence as a generalized ability to achieve goals (much as in Villiam_Bur’s comment).
While I was trying to find a quote, roughly saying “I know my students begin to understand object-oriented programming when they start to anthropomorphize their objects”, I could only find Dijkstra’s bashing of OO and anthropomorphization: http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/264.
“As a teacher of object-oriented programming, I know that I have succeeded when students anthropomorphise their objects, that is, when they turn to their partners and speak of one object asking another object to do something. I have found that this happens more often, and more quickly, when I teach with Smalltalk than when I teach with Java: Smalltalk programmers tend to talk about objects, while Java programmers tend to talk about classes.” Object-oriented programming: some history, and challenges for the next fifty years by Andrew P. Black