An applicative functor is a monoidal functor. What is a monoidal functor?
A monoidal functor is a functor between two monoidal categories that is roughly a monoid homomorphism (f (x <> y) = f x <> f y, f mempty = mempty) wrt their respective monoids.
But what are monoidal categories? They're categories equipped respectively with a "product" bifunctor and an "identity" object (subject to laws that are the rough translation of the monoid laws, which i will handwave).
Take Hask (types as objects, functions as morphisms) for example. Hask can be interpreted as a monoidal category if you take the bifunctor (,) as the product and () as the unit. This is more or less the "free monoid" of our monoidal category, because we're just taking the empty list of types as empty and concatenation of two types as append.
Now think of some applicative functor you know (e.g. Maybe). TBasically what it means for this functor to be monoidal is for the result of Maybe Hask to also be a monoidal category (in this c