> I have to wonder if programming should have kept pascals distinction between functions that only return one thing and procedures that go off and manipulate other things and do not give a return value.

What you want is to use a language that has higher-kinded types and monads so that functions can have both effects (even multiple distinct kinds of effects) and return values, but the distinction between the two is clear, and when composing effectful functions you have to be explicit about how they compose. (You can still say "run these three possibly-erroring functions in a pipeline and return either the successful result or an error from whichever one failed", but you have to make a deliberate choice to).