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

[Andrew Wagner]

That's great, unless the imperative programmer happens to be one of
the 90% of programmers that isn't particularly familiar with group
theory...

On 8/1/07, Greg Meredith <lgreg.meredith at biosimilarity.com> wrote:
> 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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