Yet Another Monad Tutorial

Dominic Fox dominic.fox1@ntlworld.com
Tue, 12 Aug 2003 21:35:01 +0100


> I suspect that tutorials should at some point mention some
> definitions of monads, monoids et al --- since this is where the power
> (sorry, QA) comes from.

I was reading an overview-for-non-specialists of category theory earlier
today, and was surprised by the familiarity of much of it - based on the
little Haskell I'd learned. What it didn't have, and what I'd still like to
read, is an overview-for-non-specialists of monads and monoids, as this was
one bit of the mathematical terminology used by Haskell that was rather
opaque to me - I think of a monad as a) a sort of a self-contained
something-or-other in Liebniz's philosophy, and b) a scary baddy in the "ABC
Warriors" comic strip published by 2000AD (I'm not making this up...).

Dominic