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I'm pretty sure XSLT functional paradigm was intentional.

XSLT 2 functional programming was intentional, in XSLT 1 it was more accidentally discovered http://fxsl.sourceforge.net/articles/FuncProg/Functional%20P...

I don't think it's even functional, as it lacks lambdas. It's just pure insane.

It's declarative at any rate. It's verbose but as long as it isn't used like an imperative language, I don't find it ugly.