But then monads are a way to think about computations sequentially. If I write highly sequential code in a C-like language, in many cases most of the code is just boilerplate made necessary by the absence of native support for monads:

    int ret = doStepOne();
    if (ret == RESULT_OK) {
        ret = doStepTwo();
    }
    if (ret == RESULT_OK) {
        ret = doStepThree();
    }
    return ret;

would just be

    doStepOne() >>= doStepTwo() >>= doStepThree()

in a language with support for monads.