I've generally appreciated Fowler's work on cataloging software patterns (and based my MBA thesis on doing something similar for organizational design), but I f

I've generally appreciated Fowler's work on cataloging software patterns (and based my MBA thesis on doing something similar for organizational design), but I find this post a bit puzzling. Having spent a bunch of time with Haskell 6-7 years ago, the treatment of functions such as these was much more rigorous and generalized (e.g. http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Haskell/The_Functor_class http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Haskell/The_Functor_class). However the items this time are generic collection types themselves - where an OO collection pipeline would use objects, a functional language would use a hashmap. Again, I'm a bit confused (though I might have missed some context). Functional languages tend to be much more generic so that a "collection pipeline" or map can operate over a wide range of types. I'm reasonably certain that I'm missing some critical point, but I'm not sure about what?