[rssoconnor]

> Or, more negatively, nobody else willingly put themselves in a straight-jacket so tight that they had to use monads to be able to do many real-world things, like I/O or state.

I want to emphasize how true this is. In the Haskell 1.2 report, before Haskell Monads existed, the type of `main` was more or less:

    type Dialogue = [Response] -> [Request]
    main :: Dialogue

The main function was took a lazy list of, let's call it OS responses, and issued a lazy list of requests to the OS, whose response you would find at some point on the input list. Your task was to keep your lazy generation of `Request`s in sync with yourself as you consumed their `Response`s in turn. Read ahead one to many `Response`s and your `main` would dead-lock. Forget to consume a `Response` and you would start reading the wrong `Response` to your request.

The suggestion was to use continuation passing style (something that later we see conforms to the Continuation monad interface) to keep things in check, but this was not enforced, and by all accounts was a nightmare.

So yes, Haskell's laziness straight-jacket (Haskell was basically invented to study the use of lazy programming without having to purchase Miranda) basically means they had to invent the use of Monads for programming, or at the very least invent the IO monad.