[Haskell-cafe] Haskell & monads for newbies (was "Functional dependencies *not* part of the next Haskell standard?")

[Derek Elkins]

On Fri, 2007-07-13 at 15:08 +0200, D.V. wrote:
> On 7/12/07, Andrew Coppin <andrewcoppin at btinternet.com> wrote:
> 
> > Monads take a while to "get used to", but they're not so scary after that...
> 
> The problem with monads is that there is a gazillion tutorials to
> explain them, each with their own analogy that works well for the
> author but not necessarily for you.
> 
> It adds to the complexity of something that is indeed, not so
> difficult after all.

Agreed.

More strongly, the main problem with monads nowadays is that there are
gazillions of -bad- tutorials and only a few decent ones.

Back in the day, when there were only a few tutorials, the main problem
was people generalizing to quickly from particular instances.  Those
people went on to write monad tutorials.

I think I'll make a "not monad" tutorial about what monads are not.