In mathematics we roughly have two ways to discovering new things: one is the theoretical approach (eg Galois and his theory that proves the none-solutions for

In mathematics we roughly have two ways to discovering new things: one is the theoretical approach (eg Galois and his theory that proves the none-solutions for fifth degree polynomial equations) and the other is the more adhoc technique-driven approaches (e.g. you can see the ingenuity of that in many of Erdos proofs). Of course the categorization is not always so clear-cut you often get a mixed of both worlds. I think it’s very similar when it comes to writing code. The more theoretical driven approach, the more structures you’ve got at your disposal to reason about things (eg see Mochizuki’s proof of the abc conjecture). For example, should you use monad in a small project? Maybe not. But if you are dealing with thousands lines of code every week you may find that if you reimplement some components as monads then suddenly refactoring gets easier and you can extend things more easily without having to do a global search and modify all the occurrences of a certain thing every time you make changes to the type, etc So ultimately you are offloading cognitive efforts to structures, which are really just constructs to optimize cost-to-transform (though it may increase the cost-to-execute (both computationally as well as mental-visualization/simulation-wise)) So is it worth the effort to work with structures? It really depends on the project you are working on or what you see yourself building in the next 10 years Depending on how you see your career it’s always good to be a bit more ambitious