Effectful Haskell: IO, Monads, Functors

Re:Effectful Haskell: IO, Monads, Functors by ajtulloch on Saturday August 29, 2015 @12:13PM (#10140456)

The Haskell monad typeclass _is_ (modulo technical details) a category-theoretic monad on the category `Hask`.

As Edward Kmett says in more detail in [1] - the point of calling a monad a monad is not to confuse the reader, but to unlock 70 years of documentation on the concept for the reader. How many programming concepts/tools/libraries do you use that have 70 years of documentation?

Being abstract is profoundly different from being vague.

[1]: https://yow.eventer.com/yow-2014-1222/stop-treading-water-le... (around the 20 minute mark).

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Re:Effectful Haskell: IO, Monads, Functors by thinkpad20 on Saturday August 29, 2015 @01:09PM (#10140657)

To be fair, the great majority of that 70 years of documentation is generally going to be completely incomprehensible to most programmers not named Edward Kmett. And, of course, there's a lot of debate about how much practical use CT has in day-to-day programming. Not that I don't get your point.

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Re:Effectful Haskell: IO, Monads, Functors by innerspirit on Saturday August 29, 2015 @02:00PM (#10140815)

> 70 years of documentation

This is probably more off-putting than you suspect

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Re:Effectful Haskell: IO, Monads, Functors by msie on Saturday August 29, 2015 @01:10PM (#10140661)

Ok, so there's 70 years of documentation for me to research monads but I don't care unless I want to do advanced work in Haskell.

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