[emilyst]

I feel like Wadler was pretty straightforward in his whitepapers about the role he envisaged for monads. See in "Monads for functional programming", the second sentence of the abstract, or the first sentence of the introduction. He's pretty clear that he's talking about monads as a tactic to represent impure notions into a pure functional program.

My point is to take the concept beyond theory and talk about application, and the application is making something useful out of functional programming.