Someone asked about comparing monads to loops. If you are chiefly familiar with the i/o and state monads, that doesn't really make a lot of sense, but there IS a use of monads which IS a kind of loop. Only yesterday I was trying to read someone else's Haskell code where they had imported Control.Monad for the sake of >>= and liftM2. And how were they using >>= and liftM2? - they were using >>= on lists, where it means the same as concatMap To a beginner, I suggest that (concatMap f xs) is clearer than (xs >>= f) - they were using (liftM2 f xs ys) on lists, where it means the same as [f x y | x <- xs, y <- ys] No doubt there are people who find the monadic versions clearer. However, since the monadic operations *ARE* loops when applied to lists, it could very easily give rise to the misunderstanding that monads have something to do with looping.