What I mean when I say flatMap is tied to collections is in the same sense that I read the poster to whom I was responding when they said it was tied to list, that is, that the intuition that the name "flatMap" leverages is tied to that construct. Obviously, the operation* it describes is more general, but the farther you get from collections, the less useful the intuition that the name leverages is.
(Whether this is better or worse for comprehension than the Haskell style of naming Monads and other related constructs and their associated operations is endlessly debatable and highly subjective.)
Gotcha. In reading the post to which you originally replied, it appeared to me that there was an underlying assumption of Monads being specific to collections. My bad.
What I mean when I say flatMap is tied to collections is in the same sense that I read the poster to whom I was responding when they said it was tied to list, that is, that the intuition that the name "flatMap" leverages is tied to that construct. Obviously, the operation* it describes is more general, but the farther you get from collections, the less useful the intuition that the name leverages is.
(Whether this is better or worse for comprehension than the Haskell style of naming Monads and other related constructs and their associated operations is endlessly debatable and highly subjective.)