[aseipp]

Haskell has always been a language where there are many ways to skin any particular cat, for reasons from ergonomics to expressiveness to theoretical niceness or practicality. "Learn the idioms" has nothing to do with it. Why didn't you just use do-notation instead, for example, than write some applicative mess where it isn't needed?

It's not rocket science why someone would ask this. I don't always use list comprehensions. But sometimes I do. They have open arity and the syntax doesn't as often require things like parenthesis to handle fixity conflicts between other (non-applicative) operators. They are asking about list comprehensions, just because they think it's nice. It is a very simple question and talking about applicative is irrelevant.