They mentioned why they ditched Auto Layout on obj.io
"If we switch to Apple’s Auto Layout APIs, we can do a little better: 34 lines of code. There is no longer any math or duplication — hurrah! But we’ve traded that for a different set of problems: Auto Layout is hard to set up, is difficult to debug, and suffers from poor runtime performance on complex hierarchies."
Hi, author here.
I think you partially missed the main purpose of the article, which for me was just having fun by playing with a language I'm currently learning.
I wasn't try to teach anything to anyone.
But I must say, thanks for the great feedback! Lots of stuff I didn't know that we'll make me write better Haskell code :)