Is functional programming relevant to web development? [closed]

Answer 1

A few examples off the top of my head:

• Yahoo! Store is powered by Lisp (originally named Viaweb prior to acquisition)
• Reddit was fully prototyped in Lisp, although they switched to Python in 2005
• Hacker News is written entirely in Arc (a Lisp dialect)

Answer 2

They are doing some pretty cool things at Edinburgh University with functional programming for the web.

Answer 3

Functional languages may not be directly useful for building great apps but we use functional programming paradigm heavily for building our Apps. Pure functional programming puts the constraint of "no side effects". This ensures that pure functional calls will yield same result in what ever order they are called. This is not ideal for web-development but if functional programming is combined with a state-changing system, a robust web app can be built. Have a look at my paper for more details: FAST Server Also these slides.

Answer 4

Pure functional programming might not map very well into the web programming environment. But the main impediment is just the lack of infrastructure (frameworks and APIs). It will be a long time (probably never, honestly) before a functional language has as rich a web programming environment as Java, Python, or Ruby.

That said, there are some options.

• HAppS - a Haskell web application server
• Haskell Server Pages
• Links - a functional web programming language
• mod_caml - an OCaml CGI module for Apache
• Ocsigen/Eliom - an OCaml web server/programming framework
• OPA - a commercial web application framework
• Yesod - a web framework for Haskell

I don't have any experience with any of these. Maybe commenters can weigh in on what's worked well for them.

Answer 5

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.

Answer 6

Here is a web developer experience in building web apps using Haskell. Although functional languages are very type safe and have good concurrency, they always lacked best of the breed api's since it has been darling of the academia since long and yet to be strongly embraced in the real world. I hope it's not too far away. Erlang had already got into it.