Re:Essentials of Interpretation
by chrisseaton on Wednesday March 11, 2020 @08:43PM
(#22552357)
My friends who work on web services have to send out tens of requests to other services to get anything done. So their request handlers aren’t pure functions.
People think about compilers as being systems code but it’s the opposite. It’s the web and business code that’s a nest of state and dependencies on systems.
Compilers are just numbers in numbers out.
While this is undoubtedly strictly true, it seems so high-level that the same could be said of essentially any programming task, with I/O suitably modelled, and so gets awfully close to "the C language is purely functional" (http://conal.net/blog/posts/the-c-language-is-purely-functio...).