Long running switch cases or if-else-if constructs are avoided in OOP using polymorphism wherever it is applicable.instead of branching by matching a value, branching is done at class-level itself.How can similar approach be applied in Functional Programming paradigm, Clojure specifically ?
How do people get rid of conditional branches in Functional Programming?
functional programming;clojure
They don't avoid them, they embrace them using the pattern match syntax.But functional programming is largely orthogonal to object oriented programming, so absolute majority of functional languages are also object oriented, including clojure. In fact clojure's multi-methods are even better than plain virtual methods of Java, because they can dynamically dispatch on types of multiple arguments, not just the first one.There is one purely functional language that does not have dynamic polymorphism, Haskell. In Haskell you can define multi-methods via type classes, but the types are resolved at compile time. To have varying types at runtime, you have to create a union type and you either have to write the function with pattern match (which is like the if chain, but with more convenient syntax) or ask the compiler to derive the method by composing the methods of the constituent types. Or use the GHC forall extension. By object-oriented I mean that the language has some form of dynamic polymorphism with dispatch based on actual runtime type. Many new languages only have trait-based polymorphism where only interfaces can be inherited; I count that as object-oriented and for purpose of this answer it is sufficient.