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From the specific example you're presenting, I don't see how you couldn't just have a Garnishable typeclass, that implements garnish differently for the FingerFood or Cocktail types.

The comment that FP isn't nice in the real world is pure baloney. For lots of "real world" IO-bound types of problems there is nothing better suited than a functional programming language with powerful abstractions. Things like monads let you write code in an imperative style without losing any of the benefits of writing in the functional paradigm.

OOP doesn't actually have the market cornered on polymorphism. As my sibling replies show, FP languages have long known how to achieve it.

> In FP you will end with garnishFingerFood and garnishCocktail because you need to encode somewhere a specifics of garnish action. In OOP you will have garnish methods on Coctail and FingerFood and specifics and related knowledge how you need to perform garnish will be on object itself.

You're complecting. In the real world of Clojure, you could simply define a protocol and provide different implementations of "garnish".