[Haskell-cafe] Tutorial: Haskell for the Evil Genius

[Andrew Pennebaker]

>
> Everyone in the Haskell cafe probably has a secret dream to give the
> best "five minute monad talk."  Challenge: get someone to have a
> competition at one of the conferences where students all give their
> best "five minute monad talk" and try to find the most comprehensible
> one!
>

Haha, maybe that's why I'm writing.

Agree on all points, not just this quotation.

Yeah, IO and Maybe are the first monads most new Haskell programmers
encounter.  Perhaps a tour of RVars or the accelerate library would give a
better impression. I bet a lot of students get the concept of pure
functional programming, and if you shock them with: "So how would you
implement a PRNG?", they would understand the role monads play.

Given that Maybe and Either don't modify state, nor do they communicate
with outside interfaces, nor do they specify computation ordering, I don't
understand why they're implemented as monads. Why not a primitive typeclass
or even datatype declaration?
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