The real cake recipe can specify how to achieve the results instead of just saying that they should be achieved. It does not have to deal with issues like lazy evaluation or defining a batter monad. It does not have to trail off into &quot;and so on&quot; or else go on for far too many lines because of how tortured an exercise it is to make &quot;pure functional&quot; cake recipes.<p>If you want to argue with this, just deny that cake recipes are a good metaphor for programming, since they are essentially imperative and that is begging the question. But you aren&#x27;t going to convince people that weirdly abstracted cake recipes are easier to write or follow.