OK, I still feel pretty ignorant about it. That said, perhaps the Haskell community would be better served by communicating about the various commonly used mon

OK, I still feel pretty ignorant about it. That said, perhaps the Haskell community would be better served by communicating about the various commonly used monad cases seperately, rather than mixing the discussion up around what seems to be a common "syntax" (approximately) to apply various traits. Again, spoken as an outsider who wants to find the baby in all that bathwater :-) I did do at least some LISP back in the 80s in college, although it was limited to puzzles and mini expert system type problems (enough to see that pure functions were a good idea), but not to do what most people would think of as "applications" with any kind of data feed connectivity. By the late 80s, AI seemed to be moving to neural net ideas, so we didn't dwell on LISP much in the other AI related class I took. The paying the bills in the real world forces you into a plethora of Turing tar pit languages :-) OTOH, simply trying to explain the idea of "pure functions" to one of my Java programming coworkers a few years ago was stunning. Me: look, you can easily understand the workflow this way -- the routine is short, and all the data used is in the parameter list and the result returned. Him: hmm, I guess that might help with debugging.