I think that Haskell has maybe done a bit of a disservice by making so much hay about using monads for side effects. That's super-important in the context of Ha

I think that Haskell has maybe done a bit of a disservice by making so much hay about using monads for side effects. That's super-important in the context of Haskell, of course, but it gives the unfortunate and false impression that that's what they're really about. I don't know that I'm feeling up to banging out a concrete example in Scheme, but I'd strongly encourage anyone who'd like to see monads being put to good use outside the Haskell space to take a look at the .NET ecosystem. Monads are the soul of LINQ, and F#'s workflows are essentially just monads wearing Groucho glasses. For a concrete example of where they can be useful, let's say you've got the following LINQ query (C# code): var sum = Enumerable.Range(1, 10000) .Select(SomeInterestingCalculation) .Where(SomeInterestingPredicate) .Sum(); and you want to parallelize it. It's pretty easy to do because some clever folks have already done all the hard work and encapsulated the whole mess in an easy-to-use package: var sum = Enumerable.Range(1, 10000) .AsParallel() .Select(SomeInterestingCalculation) .Where(SomeInterestingPredicate) .Sum();