> In haskell the application has to be an elegant diamond or the thing won't even compile!

Nonsense - You only have to make things as hard/elegant as you want them to be (and fore sure, some people do play that game for better/worse).

But, Haskell will happily allow you throw everything in to IO; you can side-step creating a perfect model and just hack together a list of imperative IO statements.

(unless you're referring to the difference between a dynlang and a static lang; that's a difference of another category altogether)