[StopDisinfo910]

Lenses is mutation by another name. You are basically recreating states on top of an immutable system. Sure, it's all immutable actually but conceptually it doesn't really change anything. That's what makes it hilarious.

In the end, the world is stateful and even the purest abstractions have to hit the road at some point. But the authors of Haskell were fully aware of that. The monadic type system was conceived as a way to easily track side effects after all, not banish them.

[eyelidlessness]

But there isn’t anything hilarious about that.

It’s a clear-minded and deliberate approach to reconciling principle with pragmatic utility. We can debate whether it’s the best approach, but it isn’t like… logically inconsistent, surprising, or lacking in self awareness.

[pxc]

You might also think of it a bit like poetry: creativity emerging from the process of working within formal constraints. By asking how you can represent something familiar in a specially structured way, you can learn both about that structure and the thing you're trying to unite with it. Occasionally, you'll even create something beautiful or powerful, as well.

Maybe in that sense there's an "artificial" challenge involved, but it's artificial in the sense of being deliberate rather than merely arbitrary or absurd.

[eyelidlessness]

This is a fantastic way to put it, thank you for adding it!

[StopDisinfo910]

You don’t see what’s hilarious about recreating what you are pretending to remove only one abstraction level removed?

Anyway, I have great hopes for effect system as a way to approach this in a principled way. I really like what Ocaml is currently doing with concurrency. It’s clear to me that there is great value to unlock here.

[eyelidlessness]

I don’t agree with your characterization that anyone is “pretending”. The whole point of abstraction is convenience of reasoning. No one is fooling themselves or anyone else, nor trying to. It’s a conscious choice, for clear purposes. That’s precisely as hilarious as using another abstraction you might favor more, such as an effect system.