Agreed. In fact I have the most trouble imagining what Haskell code looked like before monads.<br><br>-deech <br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Mon, Aug 2, 2010 at 6:34 PM, Richard O'Keefe <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:ok@cs.otago.ac.nz">ok@cs.otago.ac.nz</a>></span> wrote:<br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); padding-left: 1ex;">The thing that I found hardest to understand about monads is that<br>
they are used to obtain very special consequences (fitting things<br>
like I/O and updatable arrays into a functional language) without<br>
actually involving any special machinery. Whenever you look for<br>
the magic, it's nowhere. But it's happening none the less. It's<br>
really the monad laws that matter; they express _just_ enough of<br>
the informal notion of doing things one after the other to be<br>
useful for side-effective things that need to be done one after<br>
the other without expressing so much that they preclude<br>
informally pure things like lists and maybes.<br>
<br>
There's a thing I'm still finding extremely hard about monads,<br>
and that's how to get into the frame of mind where inventing<br>
things like Monad and Applicative and Arrows is something I could<br>
do myself. Functor, yes, I could have invented Functor.<br>
But not the others.<br>
<div><div></div><div class="h5"><br>
<br>
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