What I was trying to say is that I think there is some virtue in being able to add effects to your program without having to change the syntax you use. Its nice to only have to use List.map and not have two incompatible map and mapM functions.

This is not to say that I don't value extra static safety. I think there is definitely room for languages that track effects without the syntactic weight of monads and monad transformers.

Ah, that's the bit I understood, and about which I said we could agree to disagree. To me, that reads like "I want to add new side effects and not document them," but I think coding style comes into play in complicated ways and it's not something I am eager to dig into right here, right now.

What I did not understand was your response of "the article wasn't talking about actually printing" to the suggestion of using Writer, despite your knowing that Writer is not about actually printing, Writer being in fact a good fit for what was described in the article, and the poster having quoted "printing" in the first place.