A monad allows us to impose an order on expression evaluation in an otherwise lenient language. We can use a monad to insist that an expression such as a + b + c is evaluated in left-to-right order. Generally, there seems to be no point to a monad. When we want files to have their content read or written in a specific order, however, a monad is a handy way to assure that the read() and write() functions are evaluated in a particular order.

Languages that are lenient and have optimizing compilers benefit from monads to impose order on evaluation of expressions. Python, for the most part, is strict and does not optimize. We have little practical use for monads.

However, the PyMonad module is more than just monads. There are a number of functional programming features that have a distinctive implementation. In some cases, the PyMonad module can lead to programs which are more succinct and expressive than those written using only the standard library modules.