[Haskell-beginners] some insights into functional programming

[Michael Mossey]

I'm starting to figure out a few things that I didn't "get" about 
functional programming and monads. I wanted to explain them. I'm not 
looking for a particular response to this post, other than any elaboration 
that seems natural.

There is an exercise here working with the trivial monad W:

<http://blog.sigfpe.com/2007/04/trivial-monad.html>

Write a function
g :: W a ->  W a -> W a

such that
g (W x) (W y) = W (x+y)

except don't use pattern matching, but >>= instead. The answer is

g mx my = mx >>= (\x -> my >>= \y -> W (x+y))

There are a couple things here that threw me off. One is that I didn't 
expect 'my' to be available inside the first lambda. I somehow thought of 
lambda as isolated, sealed-off from the rest of the universe. But they 
aren't. I believe this is the concept of closures, or related to it?

Secondly, I didn't expect >>= to be available inside the lambda. This is 
related to the mistaken conception of >>= as a procedural statement rather 
than an expression. In Python, where I have previously encountered lambdas, 
no statements are allowed inside lambdas. Of course, >>= is actually an 
expression and you can put any expression to the right of a lambda ->.

Maybe these are typical beginner misconceptions, or maybe they have more to 
do with coming from Python and complete beginners actually find it more 
natural.

Mike