Kevin Jardine
The more I learn about monads, however, the less I understand them. I've seen plenty of comments suggesting that monads are easy to understand, but for me they are not.
How did you learn monads? More and more people seem to be getting away from trying to say that monads are containers/burritos/etc. and just teaching them by way of the definition, either >>= and return or just join (ignoring that wart known as "fail"); Tillman alluded to this approach earlier. One way of doing so (e.g. by RWH) is to use these definitions in a specific (non-IO) monad (usually a parser) and then generalise them. If you want an alternative to RWH that takes this approach, I've found Tony Morris' take on this to be reasonable: Slides (currently seem to be down): http://projects.tmorris.net/public/what-does-monad-mean/artifacts/1.0/chunk-... Video: http://vimeo.com/8729673 -- Ivan Lazar Miljenovic Ivan.Miljenovic@gmail.com IvanMiljenovic.wordpress.com