> The primary precept of functional programming is that there are ZERO side effects. Well, welcome to the real world of hardware/network failures. You clearly

> The primary precept of functional programming is that there are ZERO side effects. Well, welcome to the real world of hardware/network failures. You clearly have never actually learned a functional programming language, because functional programming tends to make it easier to handle errors and side effects precisely because they are more contained, instead of allowing any arbitrary code to throw an exception, or having to remember to handle error codes, etc. I strongly suggest that you build a small toy program in a language like Haskell—it really does change how you approach problems, even in more mainstream, imperative languages.