Are Databases and Functional Programming at odds?

Question

I\'ve been a web developer for some time now, and have recently started learning some functional programming. Like others, I\'ve had some significant trouble apply many of

Answer 1

1. Functional languages do not have the goal to remain stateless, they have the goal to make management of state explicit. For instance, in Haskell, you can consider the State monad as the heart of "normal" state and the IO monad a representation of state which must exist outside of the program. Both of these monads allow you to (a) explicitly represent stateful actions and (b) build stateful actions by composing them using referentially transparent tools.

2. You reference a number of ORMs, which, per their name, abstract databases as sets of objects. Truely, this is not what the information in a relational database represents! Per its name, it represents relational data. SQL is an algebra (language) for handling relationships on a relational data set and is actually quite "functional" itself. I bring this up so as to consider that (a) ORMs are not the only way to map database information, (b) that SQL is actually a pretty nice language for some database designs, and (c) that functional languages often have relational algebra mappings which expose the power of SQL in an idiomatic (and in the case of Haskell, typechecked) fashion.

I would say most lisps are a poor man's functional language. It's fully capable of being used according to modern functional practices, but since it doesn't require them the community is less likely to use them. This leads to a mixture of methods which can be highly useful but certainly obscures how pure functional interfaces can still use databases meaningfully.