This is really a general question, but any advice is welcome. I'm currently working through Typeclassopedia and all the tutorials it links to. I'm really enjoying it, but a kind of scary question is: when I begin to write "real" software in Haskell, how will I find natural places to use the types and how will I make the transition to idiomatic Haskell? [Note: the main application I have for Haskell is my music composition hobby. I plan to use Haskell to write software for editing music and for computer-assisted composition (CAC). CAC means the computer does some of the tedious work involved in searching for, and evaluation of, combinations of musical themes. All my algorithms are personal to my own process. There is no off-the-shelf software that can help me. That's why it's fortunate I'm a programmer. The CAC features need to be tightly integrated into a musical score editor, hence I have to write that too. Really quite a fun project, and even if it takes two years, I will get years and years of enjoyment from it!] Then it occurred to me that a common theme in Haskell is to provide a way to express a solution to a problem in an expressive form that is natural to that problem. So maybe what I need to do is stop thinking, "Where can I use this type," and instead dream up ways to express ideas in a simple and natural form, then make use of Haskell types and type classes to make that expressive form a reality. For example, in a music editor, there are many actions that create new notes. A note needs many pieces of information to describe it: the note's place in time, its duration, dynamics, whether tied to successive notes, type of flag or beam... Much of this information can be inferred from the context in which the note is created, and so a natural expressive language would bring a new note into existence with a minimal need for providing details. Those details would be inferred from the context. So that's a Reader monad right there. Thanks, Mike