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    +1 despite the question has been framed rather antagonistically, it's a good question. Commented Jan 12, 2012 at 3:36
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    As many have stated in the answers, Functional decomposition and Functional programming are two different beasts. So conclusion that "this seems to pretty much a challenge to functional programming" is plainly wrong, it has nothing to do with it. Commented Jan 12, 2012 at 10:24
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    Clearly McConnel's knowledge in the modern functional data type systems and high order first class modules is somewhat patchy. His statement is utterly nonsense, since we've got the first class modules and functors (see SML), type classes (see Haskell). It's just another example of how OO way of thinking is more a religion than a respectful design methodology. And, by the way, where did you get this thing about the concurrency? Most of the functional programmers do not care at all about the parallelism. Commented Jan 12, 2012 at 11:38
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    @SK-logic All McConnell said was that "functional decomposition alone" does not provide the same means of abstraction as OOP, which seems a pretty safe statement to me. Nowhere does he say that FP languages don't have means of abstractions as powerful as OOP. In fact he doesn't mention FP languages at all. That's just the OP's interpretation. Commented Jan 12, 2012 at 12:29
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    @sepp2k, ok, I see. But still, a very complex and well-layered system of data structures and processing abstractions can be built on top of nothing but functional decomposition for nearly pure lambda calculus - via simulating the modules behaviour. No need for the OO abstractions at all. Commented Jan 12, 2012 at 15:50