Hi, I found a paper from the Greats exactly about desugaring monads into applicatives: The type of >>= allows the second computation (f b) to depend on the result a of the first, whereas <*> does not. This is the essence of the difference between Monad and Applicative; Monad allows dependencies on previous results, whereas Applicative does not. "Desugaring Haskell’s do-Notation into Applicative Operations" by marlow, SPJ, kmett and mokhov