[contificate]

I have a rather niche theory that many Hindley-Milner type inference tutorials written by Haskellers insist on teaching the error-prone, slow, details of algorithm W because otherwise the authors would need to commit to a way to do destructive unification (as implied by algorithm J) that doesn't attract pedantic criticism from other Haskellers.

For me, I stopped trying to learn Haskell because I couldn't quite make the jump from writing trivial (but neat) little self-contained programs to writing larger, more involved, programs. You seem to need to buy into a contorted way of mentally modelling the problem domain that doesn't quite pay off in the ways advertised to you by Haskell's proponents (as arguments against contrary approaches tend to be hyperbolic). I'm all for persistent data structures, avoiding global state, monadic style, etc. but I find that OCaml is a simpler, pragmatic, vehicle for these ideas without being forced to bend over backwards at every hurdle for limited benefit.