One of the things I like about Clojure is that it doesn't tout itself as a "functional language", even though in many senses it is. The reason is that outside the enthusiast circles, i.e. in pretty much every enterprise, the term "functional language" is considered almost toxic; the term "monad" is highly toxic. Because Clojure has always been careful to put a lot of emphasis on practice over theory, if any monad-based approach to program composition is to be taken, a different name must be found for it. I think monads (not that I understand exactly what they are - I used to, but I forgot :)) are mostly useful for language designers. It is a very high-level abstraction, and the developer does not need to understand it in order to use a particular application of monads. In any case, anything with that even mentions the word monad can forget about widespread adoption. You can use them to build a specific API and then give it a different name, just don't mention the word.
Yes - I recall Simon Peyton Jones (one of the Haskell designers) commented on this in a talk when he came to town. He said, "The biggest mistake we made was calling them Monads. That's a big scary word."
Re naming and specific APIs - there is a comment along these lines on this blog entry:
"As you may have noticed, I reused list concatenation as monoid addition, but this makes a lot of sense, as list concatenation satisfies all the monoid laws, and no other laws. A more accessible way of saying that a type is a monoid is to say that it is combinable, addable, appendable or summable."
