I started to understand monads when I compared the Maybe monad to the short-circuiting behavior of the Unix pipe. That doesn't mean my insight will work for anybody else, though.

Also, having masses of Haskell blog posts saying, "No, monads are actually not that hard, here's (an explanation that probably won't actually make all that much sense)." probably doesn't help to dispel the myth that Haskell is hard / impractical / whatever.

In understanding monads, I think Maybe and List are the best places to start, because they're familiar data structures. IO is conceptually familiar, but IO as an immutable value representing a series of actions is not.

Agreed, strongly. Trying to understand monads in terms of IO makes things vastly more difficult than necessary.

Well, just as "monads are like burritos", IO is like a delicious but sketchy fish taco. Eating is input. We shan't discuss the output process; we all know how it works and what it looks like. Food poisoning or poor health can lead to usage of standard error. In practice, stdout and stderr are usually redirected to the same buffer, which is flushed shortly after a write.

brilliant.