I don't really see what you're saying here. I didn't mean to equivocate the structures except in terms of their "alien-ness".

But Monads are "special", in that literally everyone uses them but almost never sees them from the "outside" unless they're using a language that offers techniques to model them. Writing Javascript? You're in a monad with helper tools of a specific type. Writing C? Same deal, different shapes.

Lisp Macros do something different (and I alluded to this with the "meta-syntactic" mention), but similarly change the thought process from "how do I write this logic" to "how do I describe this logic".

> . I’m not even sure the plain »monad« concept even exists as an abstraction instead of in docstrings.

Since they are annihilated in the Haskell runtime as well that shouldn't be terribly surprising. It's a modeling technique to build programs algebraically. It's like asking if Generics exist at runtime. They do inasmuch as they are relevant to the interpretation of the program.

The »plain monad« part was directed at Javascript, not Haskell. Haskell, like JS, can work perfectly fine without monads, but it still works perfectly fine with them ;-)

main :: [Response] -> [Request]