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The power of Haskell is that it acknowledges the fact that it's a messy world and deals with it with the help of Monads.

You could turn it around and say that non-haskell programs live in an ivory tower and ignore the messy world below :)

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I downvoted you because you're putting Monads on a pedestal and misrepresenting their purpose. When you mean IO (or perhaps ST and State) please don't say "Monads". Remember that [] is an instance of Monad too, and it has nothing at all to do with dealing with the messy world. A monad is just a typeclass with two operators that behave according to certain identity and associativity laws, and a _lot_ of types fulfil them.

> it's a messy world and deals with it with the help of Monads.

So someone has a tough problem dealing with the messy real world, and then you tell him to use Monads. Now he has two problems :-)

Ok, I'm kidding, but mbrock's answer is a lot better in terms of selling the language in that it mentions something that anyone can figure out is a good idea, without getting into the details of it.

> encourage a clean "separation of concerns" between logic and interaction.

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