Most Scala developers are familiar with monadic precessing. Monads provide flatMap and hence for-comprehensions (syntactic sugar for map and flatMap).
Often we don't need Monads. Applicatives are sufficient in many cases.
In this talk I examine the differences between monadic and applicative processing and give some guide lines when to use which.
After a closer look to the Applicative trait I will contrast the gist of Either and cats.data.Validated (the latter being an Applicative but not a Monad).
I will also look at traversing and sequencing which harness Applicatives as well.