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Comment by ostvp | Hacker News Reader

js actually supports functional paradigm. So, node.js has the most mature ecosystem for web i guess.

There’s a huge difference between being a functional language and supporting functional paradigms.

Nearly every major language does the latter, but if you consider immutability a key functional feature, for example, you’ll sorely miss it when the language doesn’t really support it.

> but if you consider immutability a key functional feature ...

Fair point. I have to say that I appreciate both the libraries [1] and resources [2][3] concerning functional programming in the javascript community. The functional reactive programming movement is a neat example where we can find functional ideas brewing [4].

Say someone decides that vanilla JS isn't enough. They can play with functional first languages that transpile to JavaScript [5][6].

[1] http://ramdajs.com/

[2] https://www.gitbook.com/book/drboolean/mostly-adequate-guide...

[3] https://leanpub.com/javascript-allonge/

[4] https://cycle.js.org/

[5] http://elm-lang.org/

[6] http://www.purescript.org/

Clojurescript has pretty good Node.js support now and there's a web framework based on Node/Clojurescript - https://macchiato-framework.github.io

You don't need the language to enforce immutability. If the project is small enough, you can enforce it yourself with a linter or by hand.

Or use something like Immutable.js, but enforcing immutability on anything but a tiny project is likely to go awry. Takes a lot of discipline from everyone involved.

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