Your view isn't simplistic, I think a vast majority of developers would agree with it. State, however, is necessary for the purpose of creating useful and in so

Your view isn't simplistic, I think a vast majority of developers would agree with it. State, however, is necessary for the purpose of creating useful and in some cases performant programs. Furthermore, in some cases state can make a program quite a bit easier to write and even read. I think there are much more interesting things to be said about state than just to minimize it. For example, you can limit stateful computations inside a function in such a way that the function itself is still referentially transparent (it behaves as if it wouldn't have state). In this way, you can still do a for-loop, or do a quick-sort on a copy of the input data, without losing the benefits of pure functions. In the D programming language, this can be expressed in the type system. We need to 'deal with' all the risks that state involve, reducing it is the first thing to do but then there are a lot of other options as well.