[shafte]

A REPL is an incredibly useful tool for all sorts of development, "real" or not. But I share the author's frustration with intros to functional programming that take advantage of a REPL to provide small, context-less examples. It makes it hard to see how I could use the language in for a complex project with significant side effects (e.g. file/network IO).

Real World Haskell[1] is a great example of an introduction that provides small examples AND situates them in the context of programs that I could see myself actually using.

[1] http://book.realworldhaskell.org/read/