[Haskell-cafe] Explaining monads

[Jeff Polakow]

Hello,

> Look!  You are doing it again!  :)  Does that paragraph even 
> contain the word "Monad"?  :)
> 
Sorry. Your first paragraph led me to believe you were writing about 
monads.

> I'm aware a monad is an abstraction and as such it doesn't *do* 
> anything.  My point was along the lines that you don't need to 
> know that your working in a field to be able to learn that
> 
>     3/2 = 1.5
> 
I agree.

I think one of the problem with understanding monads comes from people 
mistakenly believing monads force an order of evaluation. This is a 
shortcoming of general Haskell tutorials which fail to convey that the 
order of evaluation is determined by data dependencies. If new programmers 
know that monads have nothing to do with forcing the order of evaluation 
when they start learning about monads, then maybe they will be less 
confused as they sort out what monads are actually used for.

-Jeff




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