I would dare to claim that there's some trend to do things more side-effectlessly not only in programming, but also in general, people in IT are finally realizing* that the more isolated, light-weight and modular things are (think of increased interest in functional programming (pure functions), dominance of cloud-based/inspired solutions (spinning up small instances of VMs)) the better. Somehow this particular mindset helps at all levels.

Hah, there's actually a term for what I'm trying to describe: Shared nothing architecture[2]. Allowing side-effects on any level implies "sharing" to me.

[*]: of course you could say "this has always been the case", but somehow some years ago Java and the friends seemed like the only "enterprise level" solution to most businesses and the general fat-stack+vertical-scaling seemed somewhat reasonable.

[1]: http://neopythonic.blogspot.nl/2009/04/tail-recursion-elimin... [2]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shared_nothing_architecture