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

[Ivan Lazar Miljenovic]

Kevin Jardine <kevinjardine at gmail.com> writes:

> The more I learn about monads, however, the less I understand them.
> I've seen plenty of comments suggesting that monads are easy to
> understand, but for me they are not.

How did you learn monads?

More and more people seem to be getting away from trying to say that
monads are containers/burritos/etc. and just teaching them by way of the
definition, either >>= and return or just join (ignoring that wart known
as "fail"); Tillman alluded to this approach earlier.

One way of doing so (e.g. by RWH) is to use these definitions in a
specific (non-IO) monad (usually a parser) and then generalise them.  If
you want an alternative to RWH that takes this approach, I've found Tony
Morris' take on this to be reasonable:

Slides (currently seem to be down):
http://projects.tmorris.net/public/what-does-monad-mean/artifacts/1.0/chunk-html/index.html 

Video: http://vimeo.com/8729673

-- 
Ivan Lazar Miljenovic
Ivan.Miljenovic at gmail.com
IvanMiljenovic.wordpress.com