Monads don't mean "impure," by the way.
What he means is that purity is more of a curse than a blessing. That the pure approach is not a good way to think about the problem. That you should use purity as a tool, but not dogma.
What he means is that purity is more of a curse than a blessing. That the pure approach is not a good way to think about the problem. That you should use purity as a tool, but not dogma.
Edit: As an aside, I already know that "Monad" doesn't mean impure (having implemented an IO monad in my spare time to find out) and that was implied when I said "100% pure functional [...] like Haskell".
They are implemented purely, nonetheless they do allow side-effect (impure) programming.
"what's often a tremendous puzzle in Erlang (or Haskell) turns into straightforward code in Python or Perl or even C." (http://prog21.dadgum.com/54.html)
In my limited experience, the type-checking constraints in haskell make programs using monads unnecessarily hard to change. I just assumed I didn't know what I was doing; it's interesting that James Hague is agreeing with a lot more knowledge and experience.