I'm glad you brought up monoids here as a (sometimes) alternative -- in addition to their inherent properties, people have a much easier time wrapping their hea

I'm glad you brought up monoids here as a (sometimes) alternative -- in addition to their inherent properties, people have a much easier time wrapping their heads around monoids. And yes, while abstraction is generally good, principled abstraction is generally better. At the same time, a lousy monadic library is still lousy. The sets of "great libraries" and "algebraically informed libraries" intersect, but neither subsets the other!