[runT1ME]

This is crazy talk. Scala (and .NET to a lesser extent) both make use of special language features for making monads easier to deal with, and neither of them forbid side effecting (IO). For comprehension and LINQ comprehension are both monadic comprehension for the operations flatMap and selectMany!

Monads are a fantastic way of handling errors, composing parsers, handling concurrency, parallelism, callbacks, and many other non-IO related things.

[5outh]

I'm not saying side-effecting IO is the _only_ thing that motivates the idea behind Monads, it's just one of the big ones. I mentioned more than just that, and the use cases you mentioned are also big motivators.