[jscn]

This is a really interesting point. It does seem like a lot of OOP/patterns books seem to talk about desktop apps that are quite different to your typical web app, which could be characterised (perhaps uncharitably) as CRUD with a bit of extra stuff glued on.

In fact, most of my experience with large codebases has been in web development, in which you're basically providing a nice front end to a database.

If databases are just structured data, then it seems a bit redundant to wrap that in an object-metaphor (e.g., with an ORM) and then use even more objects to perform operations on the data by way of those ORM-objects.

Django is a good example of the kind of thing I'm talking about. I've been thinking a fair bit lately about the limitations of this style of framework, and I wonder if this idea of functions operating on structured data might be a better way to approach things.

It sounds like Scala might be a good language to experiment with this kind of approach, as others have suggested elsewhere in this thread.