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

Coming at Applicative from "Functor" it generalizes "fmap" to easily express acting on several arguments (liftA2) or a sequence of arguments (using <*>).

Coming at Applicative from "Monad" it does not let the computation depend on the value that is computed. Specifically you cannot pattern match and branch on a returned value, typically all you can do is pass it to another constructor or function.

Thus I see Applicative as sandwiched in between Functor and Monad. Recognizing when you are not branching on the values from a monadic computation is one way to see when to switch to Applicative.