Re: Functional Programming in the Larger or FunctionalOriented Software Engineering

At 05:34 PM 3/18/2007 +0100, Pascal Costanza wrote: 
- Functional programming seems to require more abstract thinking than object-oriented programming. Objects seem to be more tangible than functions. The idea of presumably better being able to model the "real world" is related, because I guess a simplified physicality of the "real world" is implicitly assumed here. (I don't understand what "modeling the real world" is actually supposed to mean. I don't think this idea makes any sense. But that's a different topic... ;)


	I agree.  The whole "modelling the real world" concept is a red herring.  The domain of writing programs is its own world, with its own entities, rules, techniques, and needs.  It is "first class", in a sense, not a shadow or poor man's copy of reality.  I use objects as tools to write and organize programs.  I rarely have the need to create object classes that are intended to have a 1:1 correspondence with some real-world object.

	I am sure this exact technique is used all the time, but who is to say that this is not simply because "modeling the real world" is a particular programming problem, and like any other programming problem, objects can be used to solve it?  Modelling the real world is a particular application of programming.  For the general case, objects are objects, not models.