While I definitely see your point of the concept being closely related to lenses, a key differentiator to me is the incorporation of invoking a functor with the

While I definitely see your point of the concept being closely related to lenses, a key differentiator to me is the incorporation of invoking a functor with the "read part" of a lens and then submitting the result to the "write part." It's almost like a marriage of Applicative Functor[1] with Lens in a squint-your-eyes-and-tilt-your-head kind of way. 1 - https://wiki.haskell.org/Applicative_functor https://wiki.haskell.org/Applicative_functor