> Monads aren’t as special as macros though, all you need is functions and higher-kinded types. The rest is carefully crafting a lawful monadic API, which is something you could probably do in most languages (but none of the standard ones have kinds other than *, if even that). Monads are a fairly simple (to implement and use) but strange (to learn to appreciate) abstraction, nothing more.

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.