On Mon, Aug 2, 2010 at 6:34 PM, Richard O'Keefe
<ok@cs.otago.ac.nz> wrote:
The thing that I found hardest to understand about monads is that
they are used to obtain very special consequences (fitting things
like I/O and updatable arrays into a functional language) without
actually involving any special machinery. Whenever you look for
the magic, it's nowhere. But it's happening none the less. It's
really the monad laws that matter; they express _just_ enough of
the informal notion of doing things one after the other to be
useful for side-effective things that need to be done one after
the other without expressing so much that they preclude
informally pure things like lists and maybes.
There's a thing I'm still finding extremely hard about monads,
and that's how to get into the frame of mind where inventing
things like Monad and Applicative and Arrows is something I could
do myself. Functor, yes, I could have invented Functor.
But not the others.