Understanding monads
“Sigfpe” (Dan Piponi) has written some helpful posts on his blog. Together with other stuff, I understand it… somewhat. Or maybe I understand it perfectly, I don’t know.
Although they are in descending order of “simpleness”, this is the order in which I saw them:
First, read the definition of monads from here (only), and stop. It probably won’t make sense.
This excellent post:
You Could Have Invented Monads! (And Maybe You Already Have.)
explains monads with enough examples — they are a kind of “lift”. The definition makes sense now.
That, and Philip Wadler’s original paper should suffice.
There are too many monad tutorials, and quoting from Tell us why your language sucks:
So, things I hate about Haskell:
Let’s start with the obvious. Monad tutorials. No, not monads. Specifically the tutorials. They’re endless, overblown and dear god are they tedious. Further, I’ve never seen any convincing evidence that they actually help. Read the class definition, write some code, get over the scary name.
[Random interesting stuff:
This post looks at them as "expressions" v/s "commands":
The IO Monad for People who Simply Don't Care
There's also some interesting stuff in the first half of this post.]
