I read the article, and it annoyed me, because the rebuttal is obvious and wasn't addressed.
The rebuttal is do-notation. The second program you write after Hello World is going to use two IO actions instead of one, and so you need a way to sequence them, and every tutorial is going to do that with do-notation. And suddenly all of the other syntax you learned, like how to declare a variable with let-in, or how arrows go -> that way, or how to call a function, is tossed out the window. And you'll spend ten minutes before you realize your indentation is wrong and then ten more fighting with how you declare a variable and then apply a function to it before it dawns on you, this is monads.
You don't have to use do-notation, sure. You can use >>= as an infix operator. It's still totally confusing.
The reality is that monads hit you hard and fast as soon as you want to do any IO. Not the monad laws or functors or whatever the tutorials focus on, but the nitty-gritty syntax. This is where I got stuck and gave up (twice), before I finally got it.
The rebuttal is do-notation. The second program you write after Hello World is going to use two IO actions instead of one, and so you need a way to sequence them, and every tutorial is going to do that with do-notation. And suddenly all of the other syntax you learned, like how to declare a variable with let-in, or how arrows go -> that way, or how to call a function, is tossed out the window. And you'll spend ten minutes before you realize your indentation is wrong and then ten more fighting with how you declare a variable and then apply a function to it before it dawns on you, this is monads.
You don't have to use do-notation, sure. You can use >>= as an infix operator. It's still totally confusing.
The reality is that monads hit you hard and fast as soon as you want to do any IO. Not the monad laws or functors or whatever the tutorials focus on, but the nitty-gritty syntax. This is where I got stuck and gave up (twice), before I finally got it.