[Haskell-cafe] Re: Can we come out of a monad?

[Richard O'Keefe]

The thing that I found hardest to understand about monads is that
they are used to obtain very special consequences (fitting things
like I/O and updatable arrays into a functional language) without
actually involving any special machinery.  Whenever you look for
the magic, it's nowhere.  But it's happening none the less.  It's
really the monad laws that matter; they express _just_ enough of
the informal notion of doing things one after the other to be
useful for side-effective things that need to be done one after
the other without expressing so much that they preclude
informally pure things like lists and maybes.

There's a thing I'm still finding extremely hard about monads,
and that's how to get into the frame of mind where inventing
things like Monad and Applicative and Arrows is something I could
do myself.  Functor, yes, I could have invented Functor.
But not the others.