<p>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: <a href="http://arxiv.org/abs/1607.05075" rel="nofollow">FAST Server</a>
Also these <a href="http://www.slideshare.net/GopiSuvanam/function-augmented-state-transfer-fast-architecture-64151967" rel="nofollow">slides</a>.</p>
Is functional programming relevant to web development?
<p>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. </p>

<p>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'?</p>