[Haskell-cafe] Explaining monads

[Dan Piponi]

On 8/14/07, Sebastian Sylvan <sebastian.sylvan at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 14/08/07, Dan Piponi <dpiponi at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Where do monads come in?
>
> Well I would try to distinguish between code that we write to compute
> values, and values which represent monadic actions when coming up with
> analogies.

How would you make that distinction? At this point I can imagine
students immediately thinking that my factorial program is a recipe
and wondering why it doesn't involve monads. Either you distinguish
between these things in a circular way using monads (no use when
teaching monads in the first place) or you have some a priori
distinction that you point out to students.
--
Dan