this is a weird analogy I guess, but I find programming in a monadic style to be analogous to how you used to install software back in the days before reliable package managers. You’d be like “oh I want to do X so I need to install SpecialSoftware.” So you’d download the source code for SpecialSoftware, try to compile it with make, and it’d explode. After reading the weird errors, you finally figure out that SpecialSoftware depends on libFoo. So you’d download the source code for libFoo, try to compile it, and it’d explode.