Quoth Doaitse Swierstra, nevermore,
digest.chew.eat.serve.cook.chop.pluck.kill $ chicken
we all have a definite feeling that after applying the functions, the original object is no longer available, and the FP view does not feel entirely natural.
Yes, that is true. I can sort of see why people might object to the IO monad in this case, since it explicitly prevents the programmer from reusing old data. Of course, one might argue that it's not really the *monad* that prevents it, but the construction of the physical world. The monad merely prevents us from trying to eat our cake and have it. Is there a computing-realm equivalent of your chicken example? For example, an IO-monadic "removeFile" will obliterate the chicken, but if we load the chicken into memory first we can recreate the same chicken later... I think this is why analogies never stretch very far in computing. ;-) Cheers, Dougal.