Re: [Haskell-cafe] monads and groups -- instead of loops

Andrew, ;-) Agreed! As i said in my previous post, i can't address the imperative programmer. i really don't think that way and have a hard time understanding people who do! (-; Best wishes, --greg On 8/1/07, Andrew Wagner wrote:

That's great, unless the imperative programmer happens to be one of the 90% of programmers that isn't particularly familiar with group theory...

...

Haskellians,

Though the actual metaphor in the monads-via-loops doesn't seem to fly with this audience, i like the spirit of the communication and the implicit challenge: find a pithy slogan that -- for a particular audience, like imperative programmers -- serves to uncover the essence of the notion. i can't really address that audience as my first real exposure to

On 8/1/07, Greg Meredith wrote: programming

...

was scheme and i moved into concurrency and reflection after that and only ever used imperative languages as means to an end. That said, i think i found another metaphor that summarizes the notion for me. In the same way that the group axioms organize notions of symmetry, including addition, multiplication, reflections, translations, rotations, ... the monad(ic axioms) organize(s) notions of snapshot (return) and update (bind), including state, i/o, control, .... In short

group : symmetry :: monad : update

Best wishes,

--greg

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-- L.G. Meredith Managing Partner Biosimilarity LLC 505 N 72nd St Seattle, WA 98103 +1 206.650.3740 http://biosimilarity.blogspot.com