Is functional programming relevant to web development?

clojure functional-programming
Hates_ picture Hates_ · Nov 15, 2008 · Viewed 23.1k times · Source

I've been seeing so much recently about functional programming and Clojure looks particularly interesting. While I 'understand' the basic description of what it is, I can't figure out how I would use it on a day to day basis as a web developer, if I can at all. A lot of what I have read focuses on the maths side of functional programming rather then typical programming situations found in regular OO.

Have I got the wrong end of the stick? Is functional programming totally un-related to web development? If not, are there any examples of it being used 'for the web'?

Answer

JacquesB picture JacquesB · Nov 15, 2008

Functional programming matches web apps very well. The web app recieves a HTTP request and produces a HTML result. This could be considered a function from requests to pages.

Compare with desktop apps, where we typically have a long running process, a stateful UI and dataflow in several directions. This is more suited to OO which is concerned about objects with state and message passing.

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