What are practical uses of applicative style?

Question

I am a Scala programmer, learning Haskell now. It\'s easy to find practical use cases and real world examples for OO concepts, such as decorators, strategy pattern etc. Books an

Answer 1

I think Applicatives ease the general usage of monadic code. How many times have you had the situation that you wanted to apply a function but the function was not monadic and the value you want to apply it to is monadic? For me: quite a lot of times!
Here is an example that I just wrote yesterday:

ghci> import Data.Time.Clock
ghci> import Data.Time.Calendar
ghci> getCurrentTime >>= return . toGregorian . utctDay

in comparison to this using Applicative:

ghci> import Control.Applicative
ghci> toGregorian . utctDay <$> getCurrentTime

This form looks "more natural" (at least to my eyes :)