I find both mental models useful. For example, "accumulate all of the monoids in this collection" (
https://hackage.haskell.org/package/base-4.9.0.0/docs/Data-F...) makes total sense as a functional operation. You have a collection and some pure operations you want to apply to combine it all into one thing.
But then, sometimes you just want to iterate across a list of directories, read some files, and put some results in lists. Tail-recursion here feels dumb. Like, dammit, I'm the human and you're the computer, I know you can turn a sequence of instructions into a tail recursive loop for me, so don't make me think.
Haskell, due to its effectful / monadic vs. pure syntax distinction isn't terribly great here. Ideally I'd write all of my code in an "imperative style" all the time, but a row-typed effect inference system would determine which functions were pure, or in IO, or async, or in ST, or threw exceptions, etc. Koka [1] is an interesting language that explores some of these ideas.
[1] http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/koka/
But then, sometimes you just want to iterate across a list of directories, read some files, and put some results in lists. Tail-recursion here feels dumb. Like, dammit, I'm the human and you're the computer, I know you can turn a sequence of instructions into a tail recursive loop for me, so don't make me think.
Haskell, due to its effectful / monadic vs. pure syntax distinction isn't terribly great here. Ideally I'd write all of my code in an "imperative style" all the time, but a row-typed effect inference system would determine which functions were pure, or in IO, or async, or in ST, or threw exceptions, etc. Koka [1] is an interesting language that explores some of these ideas.
[1] http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/koka/