Ropes remind me of Haskell's

  type ShowS = String -> String

`Text` is generally preferred to `String` in Haskell, but I've happily written parsers that depend on `ShowS` to defer concatenation to linear time final output. `Text` to me always felt more C-like, and better suited to C-like applications.

I've survived in math partly by attempting to catalog how others think. I sense a divide in Haskell, between people who prefer to view the compiler as a hermetically sealed abstraction, and those of us who try exploit what we think the compiler is doing. To view `ShowS` as a rope one needs to consider how the compiler handles lazy evaluation.