[JamesSwift]

Thats all well and good but I've taken the same position as OP when discussing with colleagues and they unironically held fast that the serverless model is essentially closer to a functional/pure programming model because its "serverless", i.e. stateless.

[Spivak]

I mean I don't think they're wrong here. When all persistent state is hidden from your code by the runtime you're as close to stateless as you can really get. Sure you can argue that there is state somewhere in the stack but that's always true so it's not very useful to point that out.

[JamesSwift]

Thats exactly my point, and is exactly why I'm pointing it out. The argument from this group of people ignores that the state still exists. The state is not being eliminated, its being shifted somewhere else. A lot of times the process to shift that state somewhere else is not worth the cost.