The fact that they are so generic is what makes people misunderstand them: They focus on 1 or 2 examples, without seeing that the same concept works in all kinds of other use cases.
People realize a list can be a monad, and they they imagine option and set are also monads. But then you have to tell them that the same applies to Future, and Either. That you can have a resource monad that closes resources.
This is when the fact that something is a monad starts to matter, because of generic concepts for transformers. Every language that has promises and lists will give you a way to turn a List[Promise[T]] into Promise[List[T]], written ad-hoc, but it doesn't have to be quite so ad-hoc. It's when you are stacking 3 or 4 different properties together that the abstract concepts matter. The lack of the abstraction is what makes some language have trouble doing more than just a little bit of functional programming, as going deeper becomes unmanageable without some help.
People realize a list can be a monad, and they they imagine option and set are also monads. But then you have to tell them that the same applies to Future, and Either. That you can have a resource monad that closes resources.
This is when the fact that something is a monad starts to matter, because of generic concepts for transformers. Every language that has promises and lists will give you a way to turn a List[Promise[T]] into Promise[List[T]], written ad-hoc, but it doesn't have to be quite so ad-hoc. It's when you are stacking 3 or 4 different properties together that the abstract concepts matter. The lack of the abstraction is what makes some language have trouble doing more than just a little bit of functional programming, as going deeper becomes unmanageable without some help.