On Sep 17, 2021, at 3:50 AM, Tom Ellis <tom-lists-haskell-cafe-2017@jaguarpaw.co.uk> wrote:

On Fri, Sep 17, 2021 at 01:43:01PM +0900, Michael Turner wrote:
I finally got (most of?) what monads really mean for practical
programming when none other than Simon Peyton-Jones said F# called a
very similar construct "workflow," a word he likes.

Was it literally just a single sentence introducing a new word for a
concept that made you "get it"?  Could you elaborate?  This is really
quite remarkable.

For me, coming from a mostly Java background (but with a healthy dollop of functional programming thrown in the mix -- but no Haskell), the phrase that unlocked monads was "programmable semicolon".

Richard