I agree that Applicative should be used when possible. I think the Maybe example may be wrong, though. You may need the power of Monads sometimes. If you have

I agree that Applicative should be used when possible. I think the Maybe example may be wrong, though. You may need the power of Monads sometimes. If you have a function that requires the result of a different function which was wrapped in Maybe, Applicative will not be enough. Example: xmlChild :: String -> Element -> Maybe Element Now you might want to do something like: myPath = xmlChild "a" >=> xmlChild "b" >=> xmlChild "c"