[Haskell-cafe] Wow Monads!

[Jack Hill]

On Sat, 15 Apr 2017, David McClain wrote:

> It’s been about 15 years on/off since I first looked at Monads. This weekend I finally sat down and really learned what they are, how they work. I found what looks like the
> seminal paper on them by Phil Wadler:
> https://page.mi.fu-berlin.de/scravy/realworldhaskell/materialien/the-essence-of-functional-programming.pdf
> 
> I’m a pretty heavy Common Lisp guy, going on 30 years with it. I also did tons of SML and OCaml programming. But I only dipped my toe into Haskell a few times.
> 
> What I was looking for was a more in-depth understanding of Monads and how they work. I remember reading that Wadler paper many years ago, and I was intrigued by the conciseness
> of changing the interpreter to do different instrumentation. I was hoping to find a magic bullet like that for my Lisp code. And I noticed that Lisp almost never makes any
> mention of Monads. Surely there is a benefit that could be had…
> 
> Anyone else have Lisp experience using Monads? Did it offer some major enhancements for you?
> 
> - DM

Hi David,

My lisp experience comes mostly from Scheme, but GNU Guix build 
tool/package manager has a monad abstraction: 
<https://www.gnu.org/software/guix/manual/html_node/The-Store-Monad.html>. 
They've even borrowed used >>= notation for bind.

Best,
Jack