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Well, yeah, but... the term "monoid" already exists, and has a definite meaning. A different name might give people an intuition for it--but it will be a wrong one that they'll have to unlearn later, like the infamous burrito (not that you or anyone has suggested that monads be renamed burritos, I am happy to say!).

We must have different ideas about what "practicality" is.

>In almost any other language, were such a thing to exist, monoids would not be called monoids but by some descriptive term which conveyed an intuitive sense of their meaning and use

There is no such term, that is the point. Offering up misleading terms that do not convey a sense of their meaning is much worse than a word that is unfamiliar.

>My point isn't really specifically about monoids; they're just an example of what often goes on in Haskell, which is that people put theory before practicality and mathematical (and hence often esoteric) definitions before practical, real-world definitions.

But it isn't an example of that. It is quite bizarre to see people insist that this goes on, and give examples that do not support that claim, while being fully convinced in their proof.

>As it turns out, I'm not one of those people; I love the mathematical side of Haskell and I love that I've learned what a Monoid is and developed an interest in type theory, category theory and all kinds of other things. But not everyone is like that, and that's the point I'm making.

You don't need to be like that, that is the point we're making. I am not a math person. I am not a CS person. I am a high school drop out who taught himself to code in PHP and C. I learned haskell just fine. I learned monoids and functors and monads just fine. I am no more mathematically inclined now than I was before. I know nothing of category theory, and care nothing of it. They are very general abstractions that do not reflect a narrow, specific use case, and thus do not benefit from a word that describes some narrow, specific use case.