Unlike many HN'ers, I'm a big fan of OOP (yes, even in the Java sense). Still, I think the author is absolutely right.
OOP is useful because it helps tackling some common non-functional concerns, mostly modularity and as a result extensibility, reusability and, to some extent, maintainability. These are architecture concerns. They're vital to take into account when you're writing any piece of non-trivially large software (and OOP is one, though not the only one, good approach to deal with them). They're entirely unimportant in small little programs, which includes nearly anything a beginning programmer makes when learning.
This also means that languages that religiously enforce OOP, like Java and C#, might not be the best starting points indeed.
This may be the wrong timming, but I'll dare say it anyway: OOP (and OOP-like namespaces) is the best known approach for creating modularity. Other approaches are so far behind that they are not even in the same game.
Yet, there is an entire generation of programmers that learned OOP at school, and are hitting that hammer on everything, hoping for it to be a nail. That's all that's wrong with OOP: it does not solve all the problems in the world.
I definitely agree that namespaces are a good idea, but if by modularity you mean isolating pieces of functionality, I'd suggest OOP is one of the worst approaches to take, because it results in a lot of implicit connections. Only global state is worse.
OOP is useful because it helps tackling some common non-functional concerns, mostly modularity and as a result extensibility, reusability and, to some extent, maintainability. These are architecture concerns. They're vital to take into account when you're writing any piece of non-trivially large software (and OOP is one, though not the only one, good approach to deal with them). They're entirely unimportant in small little programs, which includes nearly anything a beginning programmer makes when learning.
This also means that languages that religiously enforce OOP, like Java and C#, might not be the best starting points indeed.