I think his argument is that these patterns are the easy thing to do in Haskell, not that they are necessarily unique. The Monoid pattern is universal, but mos

I think his argument is that these patterns are the easy thing to do in Haskell, not that they are necessarily unique. The Monoid pattern is universal, but most languages don't give you tools to talk about it as an entity. It is harder to enforce something like implementing a Monoid Ruby or JavaScript but you can always implement mappend, mempty and use "duck typing". Haskell's advantage in encoding these patterns is static checking, and type classes.