> but even in those, you typically have the more imperative operations as the lower levelsYes, the monadic part is the functional core, and the runtime is the imperative shell.
> Consider your basic point of sale terminal. They get a payment token from your provider using the chip, but they don't resolve the transaction with your card/chip still inserted. I don't know any monad trick that would let that general flow appear in a static piece of the code?
What do you mean by Monad trick? That's precisely the kind of thing the IO monad exists for. If you need to fetch things on an API: IO. If you need to read/save things on a DB: IO. DB Transaction: IO.