And for those of us who struggle with rote memorization, it's a huge artificial barrier.

Though in my experience even the "flash cards" are hard to find on the internet.

It's not an artificial barrier, you just didn't learn anything useful yet. So now you know what the words mean, but they mean super mundane stuff that you've probably dealt with a hundred times. You already knew how to use map and array concatenation before you even heard of the word monad.

There's some magic to these words, but that magic is in how they're used to create new software, real things you can do with them that are easier to talk about when you've got single words for the concepts instead of vague descriptions.

People in Haskell do things like having concatenating to an array be the same syntax as executing two statements sequentially. That's sort of weird, and probably useless, but the whole idea that two sequential statements are basically a monadic operation over the state of your computer, and maybe over the entire world was a new idea in the 90s and it captured something in the formal domain that we hadn't really captured as well before I believe.

edit: I'm not trying to convince you that monads are important or even useful in general, I hope it doesn't come across that way. My favourite programming languages don't have monads as a fundamental concept, Haskell fell from my list a couple years ago. It's an interesting way of thinking about types and computing and I think that makes it more interesting than just a bunch of dense definitions for mysterious looking names.

I should be clear: you don't have to sell me on Haskell or these other concepts. I would love to add all that stuff to my toolbelt. I'm suggesting that the zoo of new terminology makes the effort barrier to doing so much higher than it needs to be.

I'm sure some of it really is warranted, but my experience looking at formal math and logic is that they make things a lot harder than they need to be by introducing terms and symbols that stand-in for intuitive concepts and require unnecessary mapping back and forth between what you're reading on the page and the underlying concepts.

Alright, but you were praising the article for conveying the meaning of the words, when those meanings are useless without some sort of interesting application.

I believe people find monads difficult to grok not because the definition is hard to remember, but because the situation in which it is useful to distinguish the type class is abstract and frankly not super useful in most cases.

Funny thing about zoos of new terminology, back when I was an undergrad I found the type classes to be a confusing subject. Then one day I realized that type and class are basically synonyms so you might as well call them type types or class classes, which totally cemented the idea for some reason. My brain had been getting stuck on this random terminology and this just unclogged it.

> those meanings are useless without some sort of interesting application

They're useful when trying to grok other blog posts or discussions that talk about them (often in service to some further concept that you have no hope of understanding without knowing that first layer of terminology)

> My brain had been getting stuck on this random terminology and this just unclogged it

Exactly! What I'm requesting is that the FP community at large gets more comfortable with the idea of providing those "X is roughly just Y" comparisons for newcomers, so they don't get stuck on all the random terminology and can be "unclogged".