[ghostwriter]

Such as what exactly? One can literally define the entire application state as a collection of iorefs and pass it around explicitly to actions defined universally as IO to emulate the default state of art in $mainstreamLang. The users of $mainstreamLang find it worthy and fulfilling and probably don't know a thing about transformers. Then why holding the work done in Haskell to a different standard of worthiness?

[jeremyjh]

I'm not making any points about users of mainstream languages. They have no use for transformers. Using a lot of global IORefs is possible but relies on a trick using unsafePerformIO; its definitely not in the spirit of Haskell to work this way though it is sometimes needed.

[ghostwriter]

I get this point and I agree with it, but I also object to your comment on having to use transformers as otherwise it's not worthy. My objection has to do with seemingly different standards and expectations applied to levels of users of mainstream languages. In my opinion they should be the same, even if Haskell allows for safer and better results with transformers: they are not universally required and expected to be used by all haskell developers. If `unsafePerformIO` does the trick for them at the moment, so be it: they won't be worse off than Java devs.

[jeremyjh]

If you aren't going to learn to write Haskell in the spirit of Haskell why learn it at all? Learning a language also involves learning the communities norms and accepted practices.