I'm new to Haskell, and I'm reading about functors and applicative functors. Ok, I understand functors and how I can use them, but I don't understand why applicative functors are useful and how I can use them in Haskell. Can you explain to me with a simple example why I need applicative functors?
Applicative functors are a construction that provides the midpoint between functors and monads, and are therefore more widespread than monads, while more useful than functors. Normally you can just map a function over a functor. Applicative functors allow you to take a "normal" function (taking non-functorial arguments) use it to operate on several values that are in functor contexts. As a corollary, this gives you effectful programming without monads.
A nice, self-contained explanation fraught with examples can be found here. You can also read a practical parsing example developed by Bryan O'Sullivan, which requires no prior knowledge.