Evan Czaplicki (author of Elm lang) made the identical argument (sometime?/years ago), with the same reference to Dijkstra's quote, but with another suggested solution, Functional Reactive Programming, on which his language is oriented:
FRP is an interesting topic (I thought so anyway, I wrote a paper on it for my MS). It doesn't seem to have caught on widely as a paradigm, with a few exceptions I'm aware of (Elm, Meteor).
Definitely not 'widely' but there are a few library implementations out there.
I reckon that the reason for this is that it's most useful when the interactivity is high (i.e. there are a lot of events to react to), but most applications (desktop, web) don't have a high enough number of events to make learning a new paradigm 'worthwhile'.