One of the reasons I hover in the space of semi-functonal languages like Groovy and Scala. Because as much as I love concisely expressing a piece of complex logic as a composition of reduces, folds, maps etc., being able to easily and naturally break out of that to execute a piece of imperative code in the middle of it is still regularly a life saver to me and often an order of magnitude clearer than the pure functional solution to a reader.