To explain stuff to imperative programmers, you need to adopt the operational perspective. Spell out what's actually in memory at any given time, what gets exec

To explain stuff to imperative programmers, you need to adopt the operational perspective. Spell out what's actually in memory at any given time, what gets executed after what, where the allocations happen, what's left for the GC to pick up, etc. If you tell them that zippers "rewire the pointers", they will get rightly confused, because rewiring existing pointers is impossible in pure code. Zippers allocate new pointers instead. That's what you should say.