Very well put. I've found that in some cases objects make a lot of sense, and the more functional approach would really end up emulating objects through closure

Very well put. I've found that in some cases objects make a lot of sense, and the more functional approach would really end up emulating objects through closures and whatnot. That said, especially for a lot of the typical web-related work I do, I find that I'm generally better off leaning towards a more functional approach, as most of what I do boils down to transforming database values to html in 'one pass'. I'd say many of the typical functional programming approaches are excellent for that. Avoiding mutable state has been a wonderful lesson, for example.