Right, so technically there is no reason to deal with monads directly. Andrej Bauer's Eff, is an experimental language, which feels a lot like Standard ML, but

Right, so technically there is no reason to deal with monads directly. Andrej Bauer's Eff, is an experimental language, which feels a lot like Standard ML, but incorporates the power of monads (really, algebra effects and handlers) under the hood. There's really no reason to conflate "monads" (the idea) with "monads" (the hairy syntactic overhead), and believe me, it gets hairy.