Monad in a sentence as a noun

When you want to program with effects, you use a monad.

The either monad gives you the "fail with an error effect".

The point is that the concept of monad is a very concrete thing.

Anything which quacks like a monad, is a monad.

There is nothing truly scary here; the worst part about monads is the name.

If you want to write some backtracking code, you can encode using the list monad.

"But when I look at the monad laws today, there's this huge structure of connections in my head.

If these laws aren't followed, you get all sorts of weird behavior with your monad.

In a pure functional language, you know the damage is limited to the state monad.

For example, the maybe monad instance gives you the "fail without an error effect".

This is where monads come in: you can generalize these functions over monads.

I think that many monad tutorials, including this one, fall into the same trap.

I read countless monad tutorials, and dozens of papers.

Particularly, you can take a foldable and use a bunch of the monadic functions on it.

I wasted a week trying to understand monads from random "You can do monads in Python, JavaScript and Brainfuck!

The list monad instance gives you the non-determinism effect.

The phrase is and always has been a joke; surely part of the joke is that most of us who use monads don't understand all that jargon ourselves.

The continuation monad allows every kind of effect.

In a sense, it is the most general of the monad types, because every monad instance can be seen as a specialization of it.

For example, if you need to do Bayesian filtering, you can bury all the math in a monad, and make Bayes' rule as easy as an 'if' statement.

So while it's useful for understanding the idea behind monads, the examples are not very motivating in a language like JavaScript.

The fact is that you do not have to "understand" monads in order to write practical programs that use the IO monad or even something more complicated like Parsec.

I learned Haskell specifically to develop an understanding of monads, but what I got out of it was much, much more valuable than just an understanding of monads.

If people spent as much time actually writing monadic code as they do reading the zillions of silly, confusing monad tutorials, they'd quickly reach the point where they no longer see what the big fuss is about.

In fact, monads are extremely simple; the actual difficulty is twofold: it's not immediately obvious why they matter and they're too abstract to permit any analogies.

Additionally, there is a valid monad instance for all functions which behaves differently from the CPS one, and there would be no way to differentiate between the two without making it explicit.

One of the reasons these abstractions are so useful--and they certainly are, letting one easily write shorter and more general code--is that you never have to specify what applicative/monad/arrow instance you're using manually.

I had a decent understanding of arrows before a decent understanding of monads, which is a shame because I don't really like arrows!Now, I suppose that this doesn't mean you should call everything "easy", but you should definitely not perpetuate the idea that things are difficult!

Proper Noun Examples for Monad

I have never, ever seen "Monads are just monoids in the category of endofunctors" used in an actual conversation with someone who is trying to learn monads.

Monad definitions

noun

(chemistry) an atom having a valence of one

noun

a singular metaphysical entity from which material properties are said to derive

See also: monas

noun

(biology) a single-celled microorganism (especially a flagellate protozoan)