Re:The Monad Challenges: Jump start your understanding of mo...
by Chinjut on Tuesday January 19, 2016 @07:33PM
(#10935208)
That comment of mine wasn't the spiel I'd give to someone first trying to learn about the typical use of monads in a programming context, any more than I'd lecture a beginning programmer on the general theory of commutative rings while introducing integer and floating-point arithmetic (the latter not actually comprising a commutative ring...).
But teaching the use of monads to unfamiliar programmers wasn't my goal in that comment. I was just pointing out the accurate response to "Adjunctions aren't highly relevant to programming".
Re:The Monad Challenges: Jump start your understanding of mo...
by bassislife on Tuesday January 19, 2016 @09:14PM
(#10935619)
What if one simply says that a monad describes a pattern of morphisms composition ? Adjunctions being the plumbing ?
(honest question, just trying to find a simple, grokkable definition)
Re:The Monad Challenges: Jump start your understanding of mo...
by AnimalMuppet on Wednesday January 20, 2016 @11:17AM
(#10939092)
Fair enough. There's a place here for technical accuracy all the way down.
I assert that most people coming to Haskell do so because "I hear Haskell and/or FP is cool, I'll try to learn it" rather than "Category theory is so cool, wouldn't it be awesome to program that way". What you said may be true, as the theoretical foundation for why monads are useful, but for someone trying to learn to program in Haskell, what you said is the last thing they need to learn about monads.