SMRTR ProgrammingOct 5, 2025Daily.dev

How Functional Programming Shaped (and Twisted) Frontend Development

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Functional programming principles from languages like Haskell and Elm have transformed frontend development, leading to React's component model, Redux's state management, and CSS-in-JS tools that prioritize immutability and predictability over the web's native capabilities. However, this pursuit of "purity" has created unnecessary complexity by rebuilding browser features in JavaScript—from synthetic events to hydration systems—while fighting against the web platform's inherent design of global CSS cascading, mutable DOM trees, and native elements like forms and dialogs that already work efficiently.

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