Edward Kmett outlines his reasons why he finds instances for (,) useful here: https://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/3pfg7x/either_and_in_haskell_are_n... Speaking for myself, I find the Traversable instance for (,) incredibly useful. It's quite nice to build up a list of results alongside a state (i.e, (state, [result]) ), and then traverse over each of the results such that the new results each have their own copy of the state (i.e., [(state, result)] ). That kind of patterns arises quite often in lensy code, and the Traversable instance for (,) is perfect for the job. Right now, if you want to have two different states, you have to employ a kludge (something like ((state1, state2), [result]) ) to get around the fact that there's no Traversable instance for (,,), (,,,), etc. Ryan S.