On Sun, 2005-07-24 at 02:08 -0600, Robert Morelli wrote:
> but I primarily raised that point to underline that I believe
> the lack of a "theory" of large scale design issues is not a result of
> it.

Well, in my opinion, there is no 'theory' of large scale design
for Object Orientation, whilst there IS a theory for
functional programming. 

Attempts have been made to develop OO theory, but the result
primarily discredits OO, rather than supporting it:
the so-called 'covariance problem' basically destroys
class based (statically typed) object orientation as
a paradigm.

On the other hand, functional people DO have a well
founded, elegant, long standing theoretical framework.
Perhaps I might agree that Lambda Calculus is a low
level theory .. but I am referring instead to a theory
of abstraction at all levels: namely, Category Theory.
CT subsumes lambda calculus, it has provided the inspiration
for the ML language family module system, and the fundamental
data types: tuples/records, variants, and of course
function closures.

-- 
John Skaller <skaller at users dot sourceforge dot net>