> Your natural choice in the "OOP style" is to write a lot of boiler plate to point to each different field you want to get/set.
Your natural alternative to lenses in imperative languages is usually to just store a reference or pointer to the part you want to modify. Like a lens, but in-place.
Yeah, but I’m saying that in 90% of the cases where a functional program would use lenses, the corresponding imperative program would just use references.
Sure, but can you make that imperative program (with pointers and all) as modular/composable? That's the whole point -- lenses are not an end unto themselves; only a tool in service of that goal.
