Re:Frege: A Haskell-Like Language for the JVM
by mafribe on Friday August 14, 2015 @06:51AM
(#10059460)
I agree, the concept of monads is very simple, actually trivial. It's just a generalised form of function composition.
But thinking monadically and abstracting monadically is extremely different from what programmers normally learn, for a start because important monads like state and exceptions are built-in features of most programming languages. Seeing that these things have a common pattern, and seeing that it may be worthwhile to abstract this common pattern takes a lot of time.
The mismatch between the utter simplicity of the concept of monads, and the complicated explanations one comes across doesn't help.
But thinking monadically and abstracting monadically is extremely different from what programmers normally learn, for a start because important monads like state and exceptions are built-in features of most programming languages. Seeing that these things have a common pattern, and seeing that it may be worthwhile to abstract this common pattern takes a lot of time.
The mismatch between the utter simplicity of the concept of monads, and the complicated explanations one comes across doesn't help.