That lens is completely useless. If you are equivocating lenses to struct accessors, then you're adding abstractions for nothing. Lenses are good for things like, extracting all unique values out of deeply nested data structures for example.

Say you have two data structures

data Struct1 = Struct1 { someStuff: [ Struct2 ] } data Struct2 = Struct2 { otherStuff: HM.HashMap Text Struct3 } data Struct3 = Struct3 { name: Text }

And you have a list `[Struct1]` and want a `[Text]` of the `names` of Struct3. How do you do this in an imperative language? Manually accessing the fields, for loops, etc.

The van Laarhoven formulation of lens and ekmett's lens library optiocs in Haskell makes this trivial.

`myList ^.. someStuff . each . otherStuff . each . name`

Now, what if you wanted to modify all the names and prefix them with 'id-'? Again.. trivial.

`myList # someStuff . each . otherStuff . each . name %~ ("id-" <>)`

Your formulation is just field accessors. Not composable, and ultimately no better than just using the generated field accessors haskell provides.