I am not an expert by any stretches of the imagination, but I have some experience of Haskell at least. Currently writing a web app with Yesod (go check it out!

I am not an expert by any stretches of the imagination, but I have some experience of Haskell at least. Currently writing a web app with Yesod (go check it out!). Outside of the trivial pure functions, pretty much all real work is done inside or one monad or another. At which point there is no change in syntax or level at all. If you just want a temporary log consider using Haskell's debug features: http://www.haskell.org/ghc/docs/latest/html/libraries/base/Debug-Trace.html http://www.haskell.org/ghc/docs/latest/html/libraries/base/D... "For example, this returns the value of f x but first outputs the message. trace ("calling f with x = " ++ show x) (f x)" A good analogy is moving from procedural to object oriented code. It seems like a massive transition to organise code into separate objects which are instantiated rather than just using function pointers or gotos where you need to. But objects allow you to talk about frameworks and different architectures, separation of responsibilities and in general manipulate your code at a much higher level. Its worth pushing through to understand objects even if initially they are harder than naive procedural code. Similarly its worth taking the investment to understand monads rather than try to avoid them. In the longer run, they provide a higher level structure to the code.