> In my experience either IO absorbs everything but the most trivial trinkets that I wouldn't ever mess up anyway, or I go so far out of my way to avoid IO that

> In my experience either IO absorbs everything but the most trivial trinkets that I wouldn't ever mess up anyway, or I go so far out of my way to avoid IO that it's near impossible to keep track of all the layers of abstraction. I half-expected this in my Haskell static site generator real-world-learning-project-of-sorts (reading files, writing files, "calling some smarty-pants composed combinators in between", nah not really just functions all the way down.. and somehow such a simple tool grew out of all proportion soon enough with ever more powerful markup notations to support etc pp..) but was profoundly surprised just how little of the code-base ended up in the IO monadic context and how much logic ended up as purely functional modules. Pleasantly eye-opening! (Sure even the IO monad is "purely functional" at least for the programmer though not the final assembler, but y'know-what-I-mean..) Just an idle anecdote though