Non-numerical use cases for functional programming?

Question

I just finished reading a book on scala. What strikes me is that every single example in the whole book was numerical in some form or another.

Like a lot of programm

Answer 1

Really interesting question because I thought I was the only author writing books on functional programming for numerics!

Functional programming has historically been far more commonly used for metaprogramming, meaning writing programs that manipulate other programs. This includes interpreters and compilers (e.g. for DSLs) as well as more esoteric applications such as theorem provers (Coq, Isabelle) and term rewrite systems (e.g. computer algebra systems like Mathematica). The Meta Language (ML) family of languages were specifically designed for this.