I'm going to nitpick your use of "list" there. There's no reason effects need to be short actions in sequence. We might want to apply effects continuously, in parallel, in combination, in reverse, under supervised control, or distributed on machines under multiple people's (sometimes untrustworthy) administration. I doubt there's one definition of "effect" that will satisfy everyone, but that doesn't mean we should settle for the same old imperative effects in every single language. :)

I'm also going to nitpick the premise that a function is something "you can call and re-call." It can be useful to write a function that you only call once... if you intend to define it more than once. And sometimes it's useful to enforce that a function that can only be invoked once, perhaps for security; languages can potentially help us express properties like that.

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"That's about bad programming. Just know what you're doing."

If I write a library with (de foo (X Y) (* (+ X Y) (+ X Y))) in it, would you say I should document the fact that it isn't compatible with programs that use + and * as local variables? Fair enough.

However, suppose we were given a language that had foo in it, and it behaved strangely whenever we used + or * as a local variable. Outrageous! That's a "hard coded pseudo-concept"! :-p We should ditch that language and build a new one with more consistent and orthogonal principles.

Alas, that language is exactly what we're using as soon as we define (de foo (X Y) (* (+ X Y) (+ X Y))).

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"If you define your functions at the top level because you can do it, you'll need a debugguer and a default scope system based on lexical scope."

No need for a debugger if you're a good programmer, right? :-p And I'm not sure what you mean by needing lexical scope, since we're assuming that we've given up lexical scope already.

But I forgot, one downside to defining functions at the top level is that you need to give them names (global names). Maybe this is related to what you mean.

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"Functions and macros should be orthogonal concepts."

Who's saying otherwise?

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"The fact that Object Oriented programming exists tell you re wrong here."

The fact that OO exists is irrelevant. My point is that Arc's global scope is enough to achieve dynamic scope in a non-concurrent program. Who cares what other languages do?