Comment by Dylan16807

The topic is what you would learn from a pure functional language.

A) You can learn and enforce full purity in other languages. B) You could also learn and adapt just the idea of clean inputs and outputs to those other languages.

Both of those are valid answers! It's very hard to be completely pure if you're not currently using Haskell.

The way they worded things, I wasn't sure which one they meant. They were describing option B, but I didn't know if that was on purpose or not.

So I responded talking about both. Complete purity and just the idea of clean inputs and outputs.

That code snippet is not some kind of absurd argument or strawman, it's there to demonstrate how the description they gave was not a description of purity. It's not aimed at the original question.