[Haskell-cafe] The problem with Monads...

[Derek Elkins]

On Tue, 2009-01-13 at 16:22 +0000, Sittampalam, Ganesh wrote:
> Jonathan Cast wrote:
> > On Tue, 2009-01-13 at 12:56 -0200, Rafael Gustavo da Cunha Pereira
> > Pinto wrote:
> >>
> >> Inspired by the paper "Functional Programming with Overloading and
> >>         Higher-Order Polymorphism", Mark P Jones
> >> (http://web.cecs.pdx.edu/~mpj/pubs/springschool.html)
> >>           Advanced School of Functional Programming, 1995.
> >> 
> >> SO WHAT?
> > 
> > So have you read Jones' paper?  Or do you have a *concrete*
> > explanation of how it differs from your desired `guided tour'? 
> 
> To give a specific example, a few weeks ago I wanted an explanation of
> the 'pass' function and couldn't find it in that paper.
> 
> Ganesh

Several years ago I documented all the (basic) monads in the mtl on the
(old) wiki.
http://web.archive.org/web/20030927210146/haskell.org/hawiki/MonadTemplateLibrary
In particular,
http://web.archive.org/web/20030907203223/haskell.org/hawiki/MonadWriter


To respond to the essential point of Rafael's initial claim, Wadler's
papers "The Essence of Functional Programming" and/or "Monads for
Functional Programming" have exactly what he wants.  These are the
papers that I recommend to anyone who is learning about monads.
http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/wadler/topics/monads.html

Please, we do not need the 101st monad tutorial when there was an
adequate one made almost two decades ago.  While I'm not saying that
this is the case here, I suspect that many people don't read those
papers because 1) they haven't heard of them and 2) they are "papers"
and thus couldn't possibly be readable and understandable (which also
partially causes (1) as people just don't think to look for papers at
all.)