I agree in principle. However, if you work imperatively, you'll use _much_ more (global) state than if you worked with a pragmatic functional language like Cloj

I agree in principle. However, if you work imperatively, you'll use _much_ more (global) state than if you worked with a pragmatic functional language like Clojure. Which in turn leads to normal people not understanding what's going on, since humans are built to keep, say, 10 things (atoms) in mind, not 100.