Call me old-fashioned, but I want my computers to do what I tell them. I don't want exceptions, I want results or error messages to explain why. I know there are many processes running that do things I'll never understand, but they must prove themselves useful to me or get out of my way.
Ha, and many programmers I know these days want the computer to get out of the way, and functional programming gives them a way to do that. I think there are "niches" for both styles, and as pointed out elsewhere, it does take a paradigm shift to do proper functional programming. I could never achieve that, though I know folks who did, and their code was quite elegant (in functional paradigm). Did make me jealous at times when I had to write lots of procedural code. But, hey, at least I knew exactly what happened and why and how (well, OK most of the time) and functional programming was all magic to me. Dhaval