Re:Teenage Haskell
by steveklabnik on Saturday June 28, 2014 @12:03PM
(#7958507)
Monads are pretty simple if you aren't pre-emptively primed with "monads are really hard."
I remember the day I sat down, worked through some examples, and grokked monads. I said, "That's it?"
That's not to say that they can't be hard to learn. I just don't think that they're _inherently_ hard to learn, and I think that they're sufficiently different enough from 'more traditional' CS concepts that said other concepts can hamper your ability to learn them. I suggest http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/wadler/papers/marktoberdorf/ba... if you're still trying to figure them out.
Fun story: one time I had to suddenly explain monads to an English professor, because she overheard me say the word and said, "wait, Leibnitz?"
I remember the day I sat down, worked through some examples, and grokked monads. I said, "That's it?"
That's not to say that they can't be hard to learn. I just don't think that they're _inherently_ hard to learn, and I think that they're sufficiently different enough from 'more traditional' CS concepts that said other concepts can hamper your ability to learn them. I suggest http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/wadler/papers/marktoberdorf/ba... if you're still trying to figure them out.
Fun story: one time I had to suddenly explain monads to an English professor, because she overheard me say the word and said, "wait, Leibnitz?"