[kryptiskt]

> the authors worked really hard to implement in Haskell something that is trivial and well-understood in Python and other languages.

So where do you get the idea that it was hard work in Haskell?

"It was a breeze to rapidly prototype and test individual components before composing them into a whole."

"Very surprisingly we got done really quickly."

> The choice of a pure functional language like Haskell to do lots of IO seems like a strange choice given that Haskell makes side effects like IO more difficult than other languages.

Haskell separates IO, it doesn't make it harder.