This comment illustrates the problem with comments about problems with Haskell. It doesn't quite understand what it's complaining about.

Functor vs. Monad in this case is a way of talking about how exactly this construct should work --- it's not a meaningless distinction. As another response to my comment mentioned, both a functor or a monad are applicable. The question is whether two instances of this data type (I'm using non-Haskell-y terms for clarity) have influence on each other (in rough terms). So it's not that I was complaining that the parent was wrong. I was complaining that the semantics he was imposing on his quoted strings were too restrictive. Another poster instead mentioned ways in which mine were too loose. So my post was part of a constructive debate on what exactly we want quoted strings to do. That Haskell provides a vocabulary for communicating precisely and tersely is not it's fault, it is one of its strengths.

Any monad is also a functor, so they're both right!

Actually, he probably wants an applicative functor, which sits between functors and monads.

Or perhaps an arrow or a co-monad are better? ;o)

> [...] but for some reason also very hard.

Yes. But that's a feature, not a bug.

It's not hard, it's different.