I don't think the post is really arguing what you're arguing against here. It says it's doing an "experiment", for "fun and learning purposes". It's not advocating removing side-effectful I/O from Clojure, just looking to see if Haskell-style I/O is possible in Clojure. I don't think it's really too "academic" for someone to do something for fun and learning, and post about it on the internet...