[Haskell-cafe] Haskell & monads for newbies

[Andrew Coppin]

Peter Verswyvelen wrote:
> Ouch, I should not have brought up these monads again! I should have known better ;-)
>   

Mmm... ;-)

> I hope the Haskell community understands that for outsiders / newbies who want to learn or just look at Haskell and then do some Googling, all this monad talk looks a bit euh "strange"?

Yeah. I spent time on another forum trying to explain Haskell. I wrote a 
fifty-mile long post that's basically a complete beginner's introduction 
to the language. Every reply was of the form "wow, did you write all 
that yourself? That's really good! You should write stuff for a 
living... Haskell sounds kinda cool, but... monads look very hard, and 
basically everything I write programs for is mainly about I/O..."

I'm sure others have seen something similar...

> Maybe in the next version of Haskell monads should be called something different

SPJ suggested "warm fuzzy thing". ;-)

> and then all these tutorials and discussions about monads will then be silently forgotten over time ;-)
>   

Oh, I don't know about that...

(I for one still haven't figured out how to work monad transformers, for 
example. And they look useful...)