Re: [Haskell-beginners] Re: WWAAA... I hate monads

On Fri, Apr 24, 2009 at 05:53:22PM +0300, Michael Snoyman wrote:

On Fri, Apr 24, 2009 at 5:37 PM, Federico Brubacher wrote:

...

While i agree to some extent that analogies are bad in some sense , i found this one really insightful when i was trying to put my head around monads : http://www.haroldtherebel.com/2007/12/02/monads-and-schroedingers-cat/

what do u guys think ?

I could be wrong here, but isn't he really describing functors and not monads?

Well, it isn't quite clear, because the explanation seems sort of confused. The "monads are a box that you can keep stuff in but can't get stuff out of" metaphor is not new (google "monad space suit") and in my opinion is somewhat unhelpful, for several reasons: (1) with many monads, you CAN "get stuff out of the box"; but how you do so is specific to each monad. (2) As pointed out by Michael, the explanation in the linked blog post seems to conflate fmap and (>>=), or at least glosses over the difference. But this is a very crucial difference that you must understand to manipulate anything more concrete than imaginary boxes containing cats. -Brent