[chriswarbo]

Well, my main comment is that the most pungent smells in this code depend on its context and what it's trying to achieve. If I encountered it, I would immediately look at the surrounding context and usage to see if it's a reasonable approach to the problem.

Without that context, all that can be done are superficial changes like monad/applicative; which in this case are very minor. In other words, the original code wasn't a bad approach to the problem; but is it solving the right problem?