On Sat, Jan 30, 2010 at 9:33 AM, Conal Elliott
I don't like this bias toward singling out Monad among all of the type classes, thereby perpetuating the misleading mystique surrounding Monad. If you're going to call [3,5,8] "a monadic value", then please give equal time to other type classes by also calling [3,5,8] "a functorial value" ("functorific"?), "an applicative value", "a monoidal value", "a foldable value" ("foldalicious"?), "a traversable value", "a numeric value" (see the applicative-numbers package), etc. Similarly when referring to values of other types that happen to be monads as well as other type classes.
The thing is, you're not always referring to a concrete value. If you're discussing a value of type [Integer], then sure, you can call it a list of Integer; but what if you're discussing a value of type (Monad m) => m Integer, or even (Monad m) => m a? -- mithrandi, i Ainil en-Balandor, a faer Ambar