[Haskell-cafe] Explaining monads

[Kim-Ee Yeoh]

Ronald Guida wrote:
> 
> Given the question "What is a Monad", I would have to say "A Monad is
> a device for sequencing side-effects."
> 

There are side-effects and there are side-effects. If the only
monad you use is Maybe, the only side-effect you get is a slight
warming of the CPU.

Dave Menendez pointed to that fine Wadler link earlier. Please read
it. To wit, in Section 2: "Explaining Monads" the "essence of an
algorithm can become buried under the plumbing required to carry
data from its point of creation to its point of use." Monads can
help keep the clarity of your code untrammelled by providing
implicit plumbing, "side-channels" if you prefer, when data is
moved around.

In fact if you follow Wadler all the way to his monadic expression
evaluator, you see that you could modularize your code in awesomely
cool ways. You get to see how the kernel of the expression
evaluator could be written for a generic monad and compiled
once-and-for-all. Any additional feature (the "variations") is
coded by enriching the monad.

Monads are powerful devices for modularizing code. Available for
free. Only in Haskell (thanks to type classes!). Get them today.

"Side-effects" is a piece of linguistic cruft played fast-and-loose
by too many people in this game. "Sequencing" suffers the same 
disease.

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