[Haskell-cafe] monads and groups -- instead of loops

[Greg Meredith]

Haskellians,

Though the actual metaphor in the monads-via-loops doesn't seem to fly with
this audience, i like the spirit of the communication and the implicit
challenge: find a pithy slogan that -- for a particular audience, like
imperative programmers -- serves to uncover the essence of the notion. i
can't really address that audience as my first real exposure to programming
was scheme and i moved into concurrency and reflection after that and only
ever used imperative languages as means to an end. That said, i think i
found another metaphor that summarizes the notion for me. In the same way
that the group axioms organize notions of symmetry, including addition,
multiplication, reflections, translations, rotations, ... the monad(ic
axioms) organize(s) notions of snapshot (return) and update (bind),
including state, i/o, control, .... In short

group : symmetry :: monad : update

Best wishes,

--greg

-- 
L.G. Meredith
Managing Partner
Biosimilarity LLC
505 N 72nd St
Seattle, WA 98103

+1 206.650.3740

http://biosimilarity.blogspot.com
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