[_halgari]

Sure, but what do those functions do? In clojure they manipulate data. That's pretty much the gist of the language: using pure functions to manipulate data.

Almost all the work I do these days as a software engineer is data transformation. Going from a HTTP request, which is data (even the header is a hashmap), and a HTTP body, which is data, into some business logic that eventually writes to a database in a different format.

Even the most complex systems I've built containing dozens of servers and multiple databases, queues, http servers, etc. All boil down to transforming data from format A to format B perhaps with conditional logic applied.

So yes, Clojure is a functional language, but functions are just a tool to be used to get the actual work done of transforming data.