Sunday, April 02, 2017

No tutorial, I swear...

After grinding through much of the "20 Intermediate Exercises" and just about all of the Monad Challenges, Monads make much more sense to me.

Therefore, I will follow the excellent advice of Stephen Diehl, and will not write a monad-analogy tutorial. Instead, I will say: do the 20 Intermediate Exercises, and take the Monad Challenges. To paraphrase Euclid, there is no royal road to Monads; the exercises and challenges take you down that road at whose end you'll see at least part of why Monads are so useful.

If you were trying to learn group theory and people were standing around you saying "groups are like the integers",  "groups are like Rubik's Cube", "groups are like m x n matrices", "groups are like baryons and mesons", your situation would be much like the student of Haskell amidst all the monad analogy tutorials. In a sense they're backwards. All those things are groups, just as burritos et al. can at least be thought of as monads--but not all groups are any one of those things.

Yeah, I suppose this is a meta-monad tutorial. Shame on me.

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