Re:Why are there no big applications written using functiona...
by Zak on Wednesday February 24, 2010 @09:39AM
(#1148055)
Any sufficiently complicated Haskell program will contain a call to unsafePerformIO.
But in all seriousness, you're quite right. Most interesting programs have some state in them, and the top-level logic that interacts with the UI will most likely be about viewing and updating that state.
The technical answer I would give is that you wouldn't want to write _all_ of an application using just FP. The higher-level code will usually always be in a traditional imperative style, since it's counterproductive to avoid statefulness at the highest levels. Almost all large projects will use FP techniques in a lot of lower-level areas (except areas with performance sensitivity.) So now the question becomes whether code that is 90% FP but is "poisoned" by imperative code at the highest levels is still FP.