[tormeh]

In Scala there aren't any names for functors that I'm aware of. I just though one day that "wouldn't it be practical if I could map an option instead of match-casing the meaning out?" and lo and behold it worked. Maybe we just don't need that much terminology.

[whateveracct]

That's because the Scala stdlib doesn't abstract over things that can be mapped over. If you want to do that, then you need a typeclass. Scalaz has a typeclass for mappable things and it's called Functor.

[lmm]

You need a term for "thing that I can map" if you want to be able to write a function that takes a generic "thing that I can map". Which I do.