The goal of all programming languages is to make it easier for humans to communicate with machines.
Object-oriented programming languages extend this notion by allowing programmers to think in terms of real-world objects. Java has only added to the excitement surrounding object-oriented programming, or OOP (rhymes with hoop) for short. OOP attempts to narrow the gap between problems in the real world and solutions in the computer world.
In the real world, we naturally think in terms of "things," but pre-OOP programming languages forced programmers to think in terms of blocks of code (procedures) and the data they manipulate. OOP suggests that programmers think in terms of objects, or things, much like we think of things in the real world.