Functor, Applicative, Monad, Foldable, Traversable instances for (, , ) a b

[Henning Thielemann]

On Thu, 30 Mar 2017, Bryan Richter wrote:

> My intuition, based on observed usage in Haskell and elsewhere, is that
> tuples are used as anonymous product types. Thus, I am interested in
> the rationale for making them Functors because I feel it has denied me
> a common, valuable tool. I no longer feel that I should use pairs as
> product types. By making "(,) a" a Functor, it is no longer an anonymous
> product type —— it is an anonymous Reader. Are anonymous Readers
> really all that much more valuable than anonymous product types? I cannot
> conceive it. I must be missing something.

Pairs as functors are Writers. The function type got a Functor instance 
that corresponds to Readers. Functions as Readers (and Either as exception 
monad) must have happened in the GHC-6 version range and Pairs as Writers 
is quite recent and happened together with moving Monoid to Prelude 
(because Writers need Monoid for the left pair element).

I think the only reason is that some programmers got "laziness" wrong and 
try to use primitive types for everything instead of using (and importing) 
dedicated types.