And this works as long as everyone is fully committed to functional programming and you have little to no turn over or a small dedicated team. The minute you s

And this works as long as everyone is fully committed to functional programming and you have little to no turn over or a small dedicated team. The minute you step into the standard industry things change a little bit. I once maintained an amazing piece of javascript that did dynamic server requests and rendered graph data, processed user input, changed views, and make lasting configuration changes to the database. The first 30 or so lines of code was simply setting up the functional haskellish environment for javascript, and the last 40 lines + 40 lines of HTML put everything else together. It was terse, compact, elegant, and impossible to maintain or make wider changes after the original author had moved on. It was tightly contained into one piece of the code, so not something that will be seen on the mainline easily. Going in and fixing any tiny little bug forced any unfortunate developer to immediately learn Chinese. Someone was tasked to re-write it so the rest of the team could maintain it effectively. I like ruby/python a lot because it meets in the middle fairly easily, and doesn't require contortions to the natural intent of the language to get rid of cruft.