From "Steps in Scala - An Introduction to Obejct-Functional Programming". Christos K. K. Loverdos and Apostolos Syropoulos, 2010.
Section 3.13 pages 163,164 Monads are mathematical structures that were introduced in homological algebra and later they were introduced in category theory. Eugenio Moggi [53] was probably the first researcher who used monads in structuring semantic descriptions of features such as state and exceptions. Philip Wadler [76] established a connection between list comprehensions and monads that led to a generalization of list comprehensions to an arbitrary monad. This feature was employed to express concisely in pure functional programming languages programs that handle exceptions, parse text files, etc. Although it is not necessary to have a solid background in category theory in order to understand the various ideas described in the rest of this section, still we believe it is better to be familiar with some basic notion of category theory. In this section we will introduce the reader to these ideas. Readers who are either familiar with category theory or simply do not want to bother with these mathematical notions, can safely skip this section and ignore all future references to categories. Categories in a nutshell Categories were first introduced by Samuel Eilenberg and Saunders Mac Lane. In a nutshell, a category can be viewed as a mathematical universe. There are many categories and each of them consists of entities, which have the same nature, and ways to pass from one entity to another. Also, there are ways to pass from one category to another. In addition, it is possible to transform these ways from one category to another while preserving their internal structure. A functor is away to go from one category to another that preserves the categorical structure of its domain. There is a lot more. On Sun, Feb 10, 2013 at 9:44 AM, Patrick Lynch <kmandpjlynch@verizon.net> wrote:
Good morning, I've tried to read 5 books on Category Theory and finally have admitted defeat. What I'm looking for is simply a book that is geared to Haskell and Category that can be understood by mere mortals. I was trained as an Electrical Engineer, so my math is quite good, but I just don't get Category Theory from these books. If anyone can recomment a book on Category Theory and Haskell, written by a Computer Scientest [no more Mathematicians for me], I welcome it. Thanks, Patrick
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-- -- Regards, KC