Towards a Viable Alternative to OO -- Extending the sf occam/CSP Programming Model

Object orientation has become the de facto standard for large scale, general purpose software engineering. In this paper various aspects of object orientation that are against good software engineering practice are highlighted. It is then argued that a communicating process model provides a better platform for component based programming without the discussed pitfalls. At the same time, current CSP based programming technology is shown to be seriously lacking when measured against certain aspects of object oriented languages. This paper is chiefly a discussion of ideas - ideas about extensions to the occam/CSP programming model that could advance the paradigm to the point where it provides a viable alternative to object orientation for general purpose, large scale software engineering. Specifically, three ideas are discussed: mobile processes, polymorphism and routable variant channels.