"The world is imperative! Things have state! We do not live in an imaginary fluffy world of mathematical elegance & correctness."

I don't think that this means an imperative language is therefore better than a functional programming language. Many problems would be better solved with more 'mathy' models.

I'm not accusing you of this, but it does drive me a bit bonkers when code becomes anthropomorphized, e.g. "this guy talks to that observer, who sends a message to the account manager." This type of code is frequently not very modular and hard to maintain. A functional programming language makes it hard to think like this, and IMHO that's a good thing.