Haskell obviates the need to do deep manipulations in an ad hoc 'ugly' way usually via lenses. Personally, i think most imperative languages are sufficiently less sophisticated than a state monad plus lens thay it is substantially more difficult to use them.
> But I also remember Haskell seemingly forcing you to push all your imperative code up to the surface layer of your otherwise pure program
I have no idea what you're talking about. You seem to be confusing effectful code with imperative code. Haskell's do notation -- which lets you write with an imperative syntax -- can appear anywhere, including pure code. On its own imperative code does not necessarily mean effectful code and mutation does not require us to give up on purity. Moreover, if you do want machine level mutation for performance reasons or because an algorithm is more easily expressed in that way, you can always drop into the (again pure) ST monad.
Basically, I think you are criticizing haskell from a place of ignorance.
Frameworks like immutable.js are not comparable to haskell. These are immutable data structure libraries built for languages where immutable data is an afterthought at best, if its even considered at all. Obviously these are going to be clunkier to use. Haskell is not that though.
> But I also remember Haskell seemingly forcing you to push all your imperative code up to the surface layer of your otherwise pure program
I have no idea what you're talking about. You seem to be confusing effectful code with imperative code. Haskell's do notation -- which lets you write with an imperative syntax -- can appear anywhere, including pure code. On its own imperative code does not necessarily mean effectful code and mutation does not require us to give up on purity. Moreover, if you do want machine level mutation for performance reasons or because an algorithm is more easily expressed in that way, you can always drop into the (again pure) ST monad.
Basically, I think you are criticizing haskell from a place of ignorance.
Frameworks like immutable.js are not comparable to haskell. These are immutable data structure libraries built for languages where immutable data is an afterthought at best, if its even considered at all. Obviously these are going to be clunkier to use. Haskell is not that though.