The question I always ask is... why? You can come up with all kinds of crazy ways to program. You can probably even come up with all kinds of crazy rationalizat

The question I always ask is... why? You can come up with all kinds of crazy ways to program. You can probably even come up with all kinds of crazy rationalizations about "purity" or "math" or "logical" or "simple" or whatever other difficult to measure metric. When it comes down to it, however, programming languages are neither for "simple expression of ideas" nor "execution by computers". They are for humans to write, read, and reason about the actions of computers. The biggest challenge most programmers face is not "how do I express this in an elegant, pure way that shows how smart I am?" but "how the heck does this giant existing code base work exactly?" and "how can I modify it in such a way that does not make it harder for other developers?" A key goal of a language should be ease of reasoning. The conjecture that removing variable does this for most people is wholly unproven.