README

Applicative Functors are a 'stepping stone' between functors and monads – they're probably less well-known but have some interesting properties of their own when it comes to lifted expression evaluation.

Two of the major uses in language-ext is to enable automatic parallel processing of effectful computations and to automatically collect multiple errors when validating. Those aren't the only usages – all the higher-kinded-types, including the collection-types, have applicative traits.

The topic is too large to cover here, so take a look at Paul Louth's Higher-Kinds series for more information.