Abstract: Remote procedure calls are computationally expensive, because network
round-trips take several orders of magnitude longer than local interactions.
One common technique for amortizing this cost is to batch together multiple
independent requests into one compound request. Batching requests amounts to
serializing a small program in order to transmit it and run it remotely. The
standard representation for serialized programs is to use free monads; we show
that free applicative functors are actually a better choice of representation
for the problem.